Defining One's Accomplishments

A girl from my high school, whom I never knew well, but has apparently turned out to be wonderful and pithy in adulthood recently posed the following question: How are you going about defining the things you would most like to accomplish? Without knowing it, she opened a flood gate within me . . . and got me to thinking about bucket lists.

Many in our social networking prone society would answer the question with a simple bucket list. Let me make it clear up front that I don't really care for bucket lists. Whoever came up with the term "bucket" anyway? I rather think of a bucket as a useful tool for holding water, sand, or odds-and-ends. When I think of my goals, I would never dream of tossing them haphazardly into a bucket. These most precious of things need to be planned for and tended to. It's too easy to toss them into that proverbial bucket only to leave them forgotten and unaccomplished.

Like a very wise, but nameless person once said, "Plan your work and work your plan." I would venture to say that many people who create a bucket list give little attention to, and thought for, planning for its accomplishment. Having said all that, I can't simply spit out a neat list of goals to satisfy the curiosity of those who would ask. Short of a heartfelt discussion with a friend or family member who actually cares about said list, what would compel a person to ask me anyway? Is it our tendency to compare ourselves to others? Do we ask because we are wondering if someone else will list some obscure goal we've not thought of ourselves, which we then add to our own list because it sounds good? Maybe we ask because we want to see if our own list is in-depth, creative, worldly, or exotic enough. I know we've all wondered in amazement at the accomplishments of some person or other we've known who has gone on to be a renaissance man or woman. To be honest, I've done it myself, only to realize I was comparing my contribution to my family, community, or mankind, to someone whose life was composed so radically different from my own that I was truly comparing apples and oranges. We're not all meant to do "that", whatever "that" is. We're meant to do our own things.

I could go on to list a number of things I'd like to accomplish in my life. I'd love to get my PhD in psychology and counsel people, write a book, record an album. Fortunately, the things I would most like to accomplish have already come to pass. I am a wife and mom. So, what am I meant to do that I've not yet done? I am meant to pour myself into my children - to mold and shape them into the adults they will become. It is the job I've chosen and the one I do with as much passion as anyone else who follows their calling. With any spare moments I can squeeze out of my day to go on writing, singing, and pursuing a higher education, I will, because those things revitalize me and give me an opportunity to reach out to others; however, no other accomplishment could ever top what I give freely to my kids.

So, how am I going about defining the things I would most like to accomplish? I think God has put in my heart a fervor for these things. He made me the way I am and allowed my life experiences to be what they are in order to accomplish something of His own. I don't need to define them any further than to know that they are a part of something much larger than me.