So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
(Colossians 3.1
NRSV)
After six years, Mary Jo was offered a job with CBS News in New York. Network news was her dream come true. Now she was more driven than ever. She routinely worked 12-hour days. The program was a success, but she felt empty. Other than work, she says, she didn't have a life.
Early one morning she went to church to pray. She had grown up with a strong faith, she says, but it had been a long time since she'd talked or listened to God. That morning she prayed, "God, what am I doing so far from home? I want to walk Your path, but I don't know how."
Within a year Mary Jo was back in Phoenix working at a rival television station. Things did not work out. The ratings went from bad to worse. Before too long Mary Jo was out of work. She found it difficult to find another job. She sat alone in her big house--lost. All her feelings of self-worth had come from her job; now she felt worthless.
In her lifelong quest to finish first, she had ended up dead last. Mary Jo began working as a volunteer at a local mission. She spent the next year as a volunteer, handing out diapers and bus tokens, dishing out hot meals and helping people find work or a bed for the night. It was during that year when she reached out to other people that she felt God's love as never before. She discovered God's love in the eyes of a man who cried as he thanked her for finding him a pair of size 13 boots so that he could finally get a job.
That year transformed Mary Jo West's life. She learned to rely on God and to keep her life in balance. "I don't have the glamour or the salary of my earlier jobs," she says, "but I do have something better: love, happiness, and peace of mind. That's God's idea of being first."
Dear Jesus, help me to find you and keep you in my life. Amen.
Ron Newhouse