What if we focus less on the trappings of our success and more on what pleases God?

12 Dear friends, God is good. So I beg you to offer your bodies to him as a living sacrifice, pure and pleasing. That’s the most sensible way to serve God. 2 Don’t be like the people of this world, but let God change the way you think. Then you will know how to do everything that is good and pleasing to him.
3 I realize how kind God has been to me, and so I tell each of you not to think you are better than you really are. Use good sense and measure yourself by the amount of faith that God has given you. 4 A body is made up of many parts, and each of them has its own use. 5 That’s how it is with us. There are many of us, but we each are part of the body of Christ, as well as part of one another. Romans 12:1-3

The last couple of days my mind has traveled down memory lane to the days when I was a child when the my family would travel downtown Minneapolis to see the Christmas window decorations. I remembered my eyes growing as big as saucers at the large mechanical figurines as they lead us on a journey, window after window, about Santa Clause, his elves, and all the things we as kids hoped we might be getting Christmas morning.  More importantly than seeing the displays the three of us got to spend time with mom and dad while taking in the sights of sounds of the city decorated in all the vivid Christmas lights. As I look back it was really a buffet for the senses I loved the most about our annual Christmas trips downtown.

When I became a Christian I began to see how secularism began it's pushing the real meaning of Christmas off into the background. We are told that to avoid offending any one religion that our faith in Jesus must remain private. Our retail stores became concern over offending any group of shoppers at a time profits relied on all groups buying. Target stores decided to end the tradition of Salvation Army bell ringing, forgetting that very organization has contributed to the physical and emotional healing following major crisis around the country. I actually had someone tell me to keep my pontificating to myself when I was merely sharing my testimony of God's grace reaching into the inner most depths of my soul and making me alive. 

Now days, it seems,  we have become a nation more concern for the outward appearances  of success than the inward appearances of our heart.   Maybe I have grown more sentimental since the losses I had gone through, but I do know that those losses with my subsequent journey has taught me that material possessions do not satisfy what my aching soul longs for.  Spending time with the Lord in his word and trying to do the things to please him means more to me than accumulating the trappings of success.

As someone who has enjoyed a very satisfying career helping people overcome their barriers I know that, contrary to the public opinion of some, that there are people who are unable to 'pull themselves up by their boot straps' because of significant crisis's that happen in their life. Many simply do not have the means of pulling themselves up unless someone gives them a hand. 

If instead of focusing on the trappings of our success and asking God to help us rearrange our priorities from one of accumulating those trappings to making this world a better place by helping someone in need we will have made the world a better place.

That, my friends, brings us the  greatest joy and pleases God!