JK: What is Success?

I was recently asked to respond to questions about success and I thought it might be of interest to share those answers and hopefully engage you in a discussion about success as a Christian writer. Here’s how I defined success.

Success to me means keeping my commitments, those I made as a faith-based writer, to show up, to assume the position of a writer and to tell the story I’ve been given the best way I know how and to trust that I’m not alone in the telling. The word commitment comes from a banking term meaning “to make a deposit against which one can later draw. When I trust that I am somehow called to write and I honor that on any given day, then I feel successful. When I start to panic, I return to that deposit I made to draw on it so I can move forward, not be paralyzed by the challenge of the writing.

Are you -- or have you ever considered yourself -- successful? Why or why
not?

Given the above, I can allow myself to feel successful every time I keep those commitments. That said, there is the worldly definition of success that has to do with getting published, having a best seller, getting Oprah to know our names. I can always find a new step on the ladder of success, and I often don’t fee as successful as I might.

But in recent years, as people whose thinking I respect have told me they think I’ve “made it” I realize that it is all right to admit that I have a measure of worldly success. Yes, there are more goals to accomplish but I do no one any favors in denying that God has indeed been good to me and my family through the years. When I want to discount that worldly measure of success I’m reminded of a Leonard Cohen lyric: Ring the bells you still can ring/forget your perfect offering. Everything has cracks in it; it’s how the light gets in.” When someone offers me a compliment about my writing I’m going to try to remember that I am letting the light come in through the cracks I can still see inside of me.

Jane Kirkpatrick, www.jkbooks.com . Look for A Clearing in the Wild, coming in April, the first book in the Change and Cherish Series from WaterBrook Press.