Be responsive to change
The corporate world is constantly looking out for new CEOs expecting them to significantly change the way the company functions, ultimately to make more profit. Effective CEOs do embrace change and push it in their organisation. To a great extent, it is clients’ expectations that force companies to change.
In the beginning of each New Year, most of us, if not all, draw up a plan to change some of the ways we do things in order to live a more fruitful social, economic, academic and even personal spiritual life.
To this end then we sit down and work earnestly to produce some well-intended resolutions. While some of us do succeed in letting our life be guided according to that plan, most of us don’t quite succeed in abiding by it, drawn up by ourselves in the first place.
Recently I was disappointed reading in a magazine, “Why make resolutions (in the New Year) that we cannot keep anyway?” What he was basically trying to say is, “Don’t bother about changing the way you live since you are incapable of doing it anyway.” But no less than Charles Darwin once said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change.”
And right in the beginning of January, I was struck during my personal prayer by the words in the first chapter of St. Mark’s gospel, “…Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God… Repent and believe the good news!”
I believe that the key to any success in life is to anchor it on God, by whichever name we address him/her and to believe the “good news”.
In fact, the word “Gospel” (Four gospels of Jesus Christ written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John forming part of the Bible), actually means “good news”. And when one reads them, one begins to discover, slowly but steadily, how Jesus positively influenced people’s lives.
Jesus’ call was basically to change one’s life by changing the way one perceives God as well as the human community. Jesus presents God as a loving father whose love is beyond our comprehension. It is unconditional. He is not a strict police or judge ready to catch and punish us. For Jesus, the members of our human community are not those to be in competition with or to be afraid of, but to be loved as our heavenly father loves us.
Resolutions that are centred around God’s love and that of loving our human family, will undoubtedly not just change our life but bear lovely fruits too, when on December 31 we would look back at 2017. Father Dominic Emmanuel, a foundermember of the Parliament of Religions, can be contacted at frdominic@gmail.com