4 Commitments To Make That Will Make Your Life Work

PURPOSE is the pinnacle for a being with a heart for success, a mind for innovation, and a soul for contentment.

What I wish to do from the outset is to explain how a four-letter acronym (W.O.R.K.) might make life work through the humble virtue of industry: work. Making life work will require our sternest vow to make four commitments:

1.     The Commitment to WISDOM

Doing the right things at the right time and in the right way — making good decisions — is the glory of wisdom. Making a commitment to make good decisions — to commit to wisdom — requires diligence, that is to work hard, and prudence, which is to do the right work in the right way, no more, no less. Wisdom is the work of both action and inaction — in perfect unison, according to what is right. Just determining what is right is implicit of work.

2.    The Commitment to OBEDIENCE

God cannot favour the disobedient or the unfaithful. Yet, in an ironic twist, we, in our disobedience and unfaithfulness, can still be blessed if we turn! If we repent, which means to turn back to God and to his ways, and seek to know his will and then do it, we are now obedient. The past is gone and the new has come. The commitment to obedience is the commitment to work; to strive and toil hard to know and do God’s will. God will only bless the obedient. Obedience is not about words, it’s about actions.

3.    The Commit to RESILIENCE

Life works when we are resilient, for a resilient person has learned the law of rebounding back — not once, twice or three times, but seven times. If we can commit to rebounding seven times, by the time the seventh comes around we learn an incredibly important life lesson: failing, being defeated and rejected has no point if we give up. But their very point is palpable: we will ultimately succeed if we do not give up! If we can rebound seven times we can rebound eight, nine… twenty times.

4.    The Commitment to KINDNESS

There is no work worthier than kindness, and no love so grand and compassionate.

To be kind means we will have to get out of bed early or wait up late at night. We will need to drive further, walk longer, and serve with a smile even when it hurts. But a commitment to kindness leaves our greed so long back we have nothing else in sight but joy. The commitment of kindness is the commitment of work to love, and to keep on loving through the second, third and fourth miles. For every kindness offered God will give back, even though genuine kindness seeks nothing for itself. Life works when we are kind.

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Four dimensions to the four corners of the globe; four commitments to the extension of godly character to the farthest reaches of hope. Wisdom, obedience, resilience and kindness are four commitments that work into the fabric of life to the extent of God’s favour, because God blesses the wise, the obedient, the resilient, and the kind.

If we are unafraid of work, and work can be our creative and tenacious endeavour, we will have a successful, innovative and contented life.

Work hard to make a life and you’ll find that it’s not so hard to make life work.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.