Janathan Grace Reflections   This is my journey of self discovery shared with you

Yes, Mardi often writes very long letters and emails! 

And as for my assertion that my life is essentially unsuccessful, you really do have to accept standard methods of measuring success.  It has to be one or more of the following :

1) the quantity of people affected by your work or personality – the greater the number the greater the success

2) the quality of people impressed by your work or personality – the higher the level of expertise of the persons doing the evaluation the higher the success

3) the amount of money, recognition, or power achieved by your work or personality – the greater the financial, acknowledgement or power achievements, the greater the success.

4) the number of things which you attempt to do, which you actually do.

So you really can’t honestly place the achievements of my life anywhere near the top end of any of those measures of success.  But if that isn’t a problem for me it shouldn’t be for anyone else.  In fact you should be really grateful to the Lord that He has given you the privilege of having a member of your immediate family be given a non-successful life trajectory.  There are things which can only be learned from that perspective, truly valuable and meaningful things which cannot be perceived from the perspective of the successful life trajectory.  By being included in my life, there are things that you can learn that you could never learn from your success-intensive life style!

Each person is given certain things in their life in order to learn some unique and individual aspect of the True Reality, not the perceived reality of our cultural environment.  Learning that particular thing your life has been designed to teach is the purpose of every person’s individual life.  And as each of us spends a life-time learning that one thing we have been given the advantages to learn, all of us – as a culture and as humanity – move forward toward our corporate goal.

Now you say, but what has all of that got to do with God’s plan for us.  Well there is one overall general plan he has for everyone – to turn from ourselves and surrender to Him and to begin the journey with Him and for Him and to Him.  However within the context of that universal plan there is a unique individual set of gifts given to each person.  And those gifts include the disappointments, the pain and the difficulties of life as well as the blessings.  Our weaknesses are as much a gift from the Lord as our strengths; our failures are as much a gift as our successes. And the purpose of all of it is to teach us something special and unique; and through us to bless the wider communities of which we are a part.

Success has no intrinsic value in itself as such.  The experience of failure and success can both have value if you begin to learn from them. And by that I do not mean that we learn from our failures how to avoid failure in the future or from our successes how to increase them in the future. That whole business of putting a value on success as something to attain and a negative value on failure as something to avoid is totally illusory. Are you believing me yet?  Failure has taught me the absolute illusion of the idea that success has value.  It has freed me from the dominating tyranny of the need to succeed.  So failure has a lot more value to me than success.

Why don’t you see what Buck Hatch [Christian psychology professor at my alma mater] thinks of this theory!  I’ll bet he likes it!  But you’ve got to present it as I have and not your personal bias on what I’ve said!

And as for my argument that art is a skill that anyone can learn.  If you came to stay with me for one month and took lessons from me for 6 hours a day (2 three-hour sessions a day) and practiced in the hours remaining, I could have you drawing as well as me.  I’m really not that good compared to the average working artist in America today.  I’m at the low end of mediocre.  That’s not a problem though.  I was a bit discouraged when I first began to honestly appraise my work on a number of levels and had to admit this about it.  But now that I’m inculcating my own philosophical perspective of the uselessness of success, I’m a lot more comfortable with honest appraisals of my work and my life that don’t turn out so attractively.

You can think about my theory and send me your rebuttal when you’ve got it all worked out.  But you have to have a workable theory that pertains to anyone –  like mine did.  You can’t just say you don’t see my life in that light and try to prove how my life doesn’t fit that pattern.  You’ve got to come up with an alternate theory of all of life that applies to anyone and addresses all those issues and resolves them with your theory!