Avoid Success At All Cost

There’s a section in the book I’m currently reading about how easily earthly success tempts us to find our worth and value outside of Gods free love, and there’s a quote that might be thought-provoking for some of you…

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and writer of the best-seller Seven Storey Mountain, tells of an occasion in his life:

A few years ago a man who was compiling a book on success wrote and asked me to contribute a statement of how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it happened that I had once written a best-seller this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same thing again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was sure this: be anything you like, be madmen, drunks … of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.