Personally Speaking
Who said “Simplicity is a very rare thing in our age”? If your guess was one of today’s legions of “life coaches” and “time management consultants,” you missed it by about two thousand years. That remark was penned by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (43 bc–17 ad), known to the English-speaking world as Ovid. And speaking of the non-simple life, if there was ever anyone who knew about the toll that can take on the soul, it would be ancient Israel’s King Solomon, who lived about a thousand years before Ovid and was one of the great success stories of ancient times. After listing his grand achievements, Solomon lamented that “all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). Fame and fortune weren’t the end-all after all.

Imagine what Ovid and Solomon would say if they could see the way we live today! Wealth and accomplishment were the generally accepted measures of success even in their day, but with today’s overload of information, rapidly advancing technology, and celebrities, global sports icons, and twenty-something dot-com multi-millionaires now raising the bar and setting the pace, most of the rest of us feel unprecedented pressure to do more, know more, earn more, own more, go farther, and get there faster. “Doing” and “knowing” have crowded out “living” and “loving.”

But is that the way life is supposed to be, or the way it needs to be? How does the pressure to keep pace affect the areas of our lives that matter most? When we achieve a measure of that kind of success, does it bring us genuine happiness and lasting satisfaction? Or does it merely perpetuate the cycle and keep us going so fast that we don’t notice that life is passing us by? Are the quick successes worth the stress? Is the pace worth the price?

If you’ve been asking yourself these questions, I hope this issue of Activated will help you find new ways to get God’s very best out of every day.

Keith Phillips

For Activated

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