Goals! Small and Large Worlds ...

Friday, Jan 14, 2011. When we talk about goals, we should not remain completely in a very limited environment. Often, our goals are part of a very small world.

Small Worlds and Larger Picture …

We all live in rather small worlds. Even when you are a well-known scientist, when you talk to important people in politics or business - the world is quite small in the end. You know at most around 300 people personally in a deeper way, perhaps 1-2000 as colleagues, friends and neighbors if you have a very large network of people around you. Compared to 300.000 who live in your town, or 9 billion who live on the planet, your world consists of a tiny fraction of people!

You pick your goals usually in the framework of the small network. You unconsciously coordinate your goals with the goals and opinions of the people who you know. Your goals really live within a small world! Of course, you are part of the larger world and trends are usually influenced by the media and the decisions of many people. But that is more like general boundary conditions. You cannot influence the larger picture too much with what you do. Usually, the system is quite stable (and should be stable) towards individual goals. Sometimes, in rare moments of history, individuals really influence the development of a whole society, when their decisions take place in a branching point of history!

Of course, there is the larger picture. What is part of this larger picture? There are all the different states and people living on the planet. There are the different continents. There are the old and the young, the hungry and the fed people. There are the people longing for a reasonable life, for freedom, for housing, for security, for jobs. There are those longing for friends. There are the new developments, in science and technology, in society, in philosophy, in religion. There are those who want to exercise power, want to govern, want to go into new land, want to break old orders. The world is large!

Love the Lord …

God knows the larger picture. He knows every single person on the planet, even the infant starving in a village in the mountains or the desert. He knows them, and he cares! He knows our plans and our dreams. He knows what we want. He knows the stable and the instable parts of our soul. He knows what we are capable of, good things and bad things. He knows everything!

The Lord wants to be a part of our small world. He wants to be among the intimate friends we have and know. He wants to be our guide, the one we have to talk about our dreams and goals. He wants to feed his view into our view. With him in our small world, we take part in the large world. Here our life will truly change, since he knows what is going on, and he can help us to be relevant for those who need our strength and our capabilities.

The first goal given to us is to love the Lord. That is in fact a key point. He IS fantastic. If we know him, we will love him. And with him our life gets a different perspective, the “large world perspective” … with possibilities we have never thought of. With his possibilities in the middle of our small world. What an adventure! ... more texts