Things immeasurable

I am the kind of person that likes to be able to ‘measure’ my accomplishments. I like the kind of jobs where I can stand back and say ‘Look at what I got done today.’ Unfortunately for me, many of my current responsibilities do not align themselves with such easily visible or tangible results. Much of what I do is, for lack of a better term, immeasurable.

Sometimes I joke about being a ‘professional meet-er’, because I seem to have a lot of meetings, which in most cases means talking with/to someone about something. But the difficult part of that is that you can not usually easily measure the outcome of a meeting.

There are times I would like to convince myself that I have made a significant impact in someone’s life through giving them feedback, direction or input of some other kind. Feeling like I made a difference in someone’s life is a type of measurement and it makes me feel good. However, it is, in reality, almost impossible to know what, if any, has been the impact made in someone’s life until much later.

There are also times when I feel like I have wasted my time in so many meetings that were ‘useless’. However, in truth, the times when I have gotten the most direct affirmation of an impact in someone’s life was the result of what I had originally deemed a failure or waste of time.

The result of the combination of the above mentioned two types of feelings I have is that I understand even more how fickle and unreliable my feelings are about the worth of what I am doing. I simply can not rely on my feelings to determine my self worth and esteem.

And maybe that is the whole point. Perhaps I need to be more worried about how God views my work and how He measures my success or failure. Boy is that a scary thought!! If that is true, then I need a whole new set of measuring tools.

So how do you measure your own success or failure?