Working For Something You Believe In
I think many of us have had those occasions.... while working for something we believe in..... when we pause to examine our progress... and we find no measurable improvement-- or even results opposite of those we had hoped for. It can be very disheartening. This simple letter has often helped me to put things into proper perspective.
“A Letter to a Young Activist”
by Trappist monk Thomas Merton
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…