“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, “Lives of great men all remind us / We can make our lives sublime, / And, departing, leave behind us / Footprints on the sands of time.” Today, however, most of us are not interested in leaving footprints on the sands of time, not even minuscule tracks. We want the shortcut, the easy, non-demanding job, and the fastest, quickest way to success with the least demanding effort.
Gone is the commitment to excellence. In is the commitment to mediocrity. Ask any high school guidance counselor how many students he or she knows who have brains but won’t use them, who could do A work but are afraid of being outstanding, fearing the comments of their peers, so they slouch in C level work.
I’ve been thinking about the contribution of a little-known scholar who lived for thirty years in the obscure city of Bethlehem, but he gave to the world the text of the Latin Vulgate that became the standard of the Christian world for a thousand years; his name was Jerome. At Christmas I listened to the strains of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah and asked myself, “Will there ever be another piece of music so great?” Will we ever see another Beethoven, or Bach, or Tchaikovsky?
I’ve walked through art galleries and marveled at works of the masters and asked, “Will the world ever again see masterpieces which will rival these or even come close to them?”
Is it possible that the problem—the curse of mediocrity—is why the lines of excellence are not connected with the dots of one generation to the next? I refuse to accept the premise that all the great art, literature, and music that fills our libraries and museums were products of an age which has been supplanted forever by science and technology, that says we had better preserve the past because there’s no future.
Question: What motivated the artists, the authors, and the scholars of the past? Certainly not fame or fortune, because many, if not most of them, struggled in poverty, surviving on a few crumbs of support from the crown or a wealthy patron. For every name that has survived, thousands of scholars, great artists, and musicians lived in ignominy and obscurity. Their names never made the dictionary’s short biographical data section.
My hypothesis is they were compelled to excellence by the thinking that God requires our best and to do less than your best is not only a sin against God, but a shame to your family, your mentor and your father’s name. Some have called it the old Protestant work ethic, something that became gospel to the old Puritans and Calvinists, but it was the discipline that drove art, education, and literature for centuries.
Paul put it: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Colossians 3:23).
OK, here we are in the 21st century, an age of satellite communications, technology, things that we hitherto had not thought possible. Where do we go from here? Make the question personal: Where are you headed? Content with just getting by, or determined to excel—to do your best, whether you drive a bus, head a corporation, teach school, or dig weeds and cut lawns?
Longfellow concluded his “A Psalm of Life,” saying, “Let us, then, be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate; / Still achieving, still pursuing, / learn to labor and to wait.” Not bad advice for the 21st century. Unless you do your best, you will never know what you might have accomplished, what you might have achieved.
Resource reading: Colossians 3
