By Briana Bass, Christian Romance Author, Devotional Writer & Certified Professional Coach

Okay, friends, raise your hands if you are over 30 and don’t have your life together.

How many of you raised your hands because you’re unmarried and/or don’t have kids? Put your hands down. Marriage and motherhood are not indicators of success in life. Neither is owning a home or working at your dream job.

Society likes to tell us that we’re only winning at life if we have a 401K or our wedding is the biggest event of the year. And if we don’t achieve those goals by the time we hit 30, then we’re losing and can never catch back up.

Society is wrong. That’s not to say such milestones aren’t important or worth celebrating – they are! But they aren’t the markers we should be using to define success.

Even Jesus Wouldn’t Meet Their Standards

When was the last time you attended a funeral and the eulogy focused on the deceased’s home ownership? It may have been mentioned if it was a dream they achieved, moving out of poverty into a higher socio-economic status, but even then, the emphasis is on the person’s drive and perseverance, not necessarily checking a box off a list.

As far as we know, Jesus didn’t own His own home. He never married or had children. He didn’t have a retirement account. And yet He was the most successful person of all time! But he would not meet the twentieth and twenty-first century definitions of success. That seems a little odd, right? By modern standards, our Savior would not be considered a success.

If Jesus couldn’t live up to our current society’s expectations, then why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? I believe it’s because our priorities are misaligned. We focus too much on society’s opinion of us, on society’s version of success, and we ignore what God wants us to do and how God defines success.

Another Way to Live

Success for Christians has nothing to do with the things of this world. We are successful when we put God first in our lives. This leads to focusing more on others than on ourselves, which encourages us to turn away from the materialistic markers of success as defined by our western culture. It’s difficult to obsess over purchasing a bigger, fancier house when your attention is on simply making sure that your neighbors aren’t sleeping on the street.

We are to live set apart from the world. Why, then, would we follow society’s definition of success? As Christians, we should reject secular culture’s version of success. If you love God, if you seek peace and pursue it, if you love your neighbor as yourself, if you trust the Lord with your future, then you have achieved success.

I know we have been conditioned and peer-pressured into pursuing materialism and feeding our egos. I know there is competition to keep up with our friends and neighbors, to our own financial and emotional detriment. Running yourself into the ground or beating yourself up because you didn’t meet a particular threshold at a particular time in your life is not healthy. Thankfully, God offers another option for us to pursue. God measures success by the conditions of our hearts. Doesn’t that sound refreshing?

Darling, What if You Fly?

Ignore society when it tells you that you are failing. My friend, you are soaring. We are all on our own paths and no two paths look the same. Success is going to be different for each of us but it will not necessarily align with secular society’s standards.

Throw off the shackles of society’s expectations. Rejoice in the freedom of knowing you are not bound to an imaginary checklist created by man. Accept Christ and follow Him, and you can rest easy knowing you have achieved eternal success.