Aspiration

I’ve been giving some thought to the idea of aspiration lately – not only what it is that we aspire to, but what is required for aspiration to exist. It seems to me that aspiration in early life is wanting to emulate someone that we respect or something that we think would be fun. Often we respect those people because they fix things. Firefighters, policemen, doctors – they all fix problems.

Aspiration seems to require something to be wrong, or at least have the potential to becoming better. I think this underlying desire for constant improvement is what drives people to succeed. I wonder how I would be different if I looked at the things around me that were wrong or sub-par less as annoying and more as opportunities to succeed.

For instance, I currently work in a church. I don’t work in a church because I love everything churches do. I work in a church because I think we as people are called to make the church more fitting to be called Christs bride, and there’s a lot of work to be done. I think God can use me to help in this work. I aspire to bring change, to fix problems and to see things reach fuller potential.

I know that this is a fairly optimistic way to look at the problems around us, but I don’t think anyone would amount to anything if there weren’t things to overcome and to improve. Discovering what exactly we as individuals or groups aspire to fix is a bit more difficult, but for me, understanding that improvement and success require aspiration (which is rooted in things not being done as well as they can be) has helped me see some of the problems in my day in a new light.