Who gets the credit?

For no reason, I got up around 3am and couldn’t go back to sleep. I lay in bed pondering a few things until 5.25am when I got up and prepared for work. I am in the office at 6.30am, an hour before official start time. What better thing to do than write a couple of articles.

When I was getting dressed for work, something came to my mind – inspiration for this article. I don’t believe in ‘luck’, I believe in opportunity meeting proactive effort to make things happen. But like me you may have noticed that some people are very proactive and even create opportunities through their hard work but then they never reap the fruits thereof; while others just ride on the back of the success horse left behind by others. How do the latter feel about this? Who do we credit the achievement to? It’s all so confusing to me.

The carnal nature is selfish, ingratiating even when not merited. It therefore takes someone who has transcended these attitudes to create opportunities, or exploit existing opportunities through deliberate proactive efforts, knowing that their legacy will end where another person takes over and reaps the fruit of their labor. But does their legacy really end? Who gets the ‘pat on the back’ for that success? Now if this has been too much theory, let me break it down with a hypothetical example; A farmer acquires a piece of land, tills it, cultivates and for reasons beyond his control, he has to abandon the farm. The crops mature and who is there to reap - a neighbor or the land owner or someone else. Do you see my dilemma? If it came to rewarding someone for that achievement, who will you reward?

I have said many times before, and it is one of my mantras – ‘life is not fair’. I still struggle though with issues around justice and fairness. But if you think like me in my less emotional and more pious time, you’ll know that we have the responsibility of setting goals, doing our best to reach those goals, always bearing in mind time is not ours to manipulate, but God’s. Whenever there is the call of ‘timeout’ for us, we should be able to say we did the best we could when we had the time. Whoever reaps the fruits will be immaterial because we’ll know our Heavenly Father knows better than us – mere mortals, and rewards accordingly!