The opening scene of the timeless family film Madagascar depicts the exuberant zebra, Marty, having an identity crisis. Marty – along with his three friends, Gloria the hippopotamus, Melman the giraffe, and Alex the lion – wants more from his life. He wants to flourish. And for him, his job as the token zebra in the New York Central Park Zoo isn’t providing the kind of flourishing that his heart longs for.

Marty’s predicament is not difficult to identify with. The longing for a life of flourishing is ubiquitous to the human heart.

Though we may define “flourishing” in slightly different ways, the longing for a life of flourishing is ubiquitous to the human heart. And the workplace is where many of us turn in order to find it.

But what is “flourishing”?

It is a question that humankind has debated for millennia, and one that I certainly don’t purport to satisfy here. However, there are some things we can reasonably say about flourishing.

The parallels between Marty’s struggles and our own reveal at least three central components to flourishing:

• Finding belonging
• Finding significance
• Finding purpose

While we differ on how we define each of these, in some way we are all trying to fit in, to have our achievements recognized and to find and fulfill our purpose. The problem is that when we try and do it on our own, we inevitably run into trouble.

Three Pillars

The prevailing secularist narrative leads people to reject God and look inside themselves to find answers to all three pillars of flourishing.

We are urged to find our tribe to which to belong, to achieve in order to gain significance and to self-discover in order to find our purpose.

When we reject God, we must bear the burden of our own flourishing. Ultimately, it’s all up to us and it usually plays out in our workplace. The problem, of course, is that such an approach does not work. Those of us who center our lives exclusively on work are left exhausted, despondent, unfulfilled or a combination of all three.

The evidence is conclusive. Thanks to communications technology, we are the most interconnected we have ever been but we are the loneliest we have ever been. We work hard to build homes, bank accounts and identities for ourselves but we still struggle for significance. We look inside ourselves for answers yet all we find are more questions.

The answer is clear.

When we reject God, we must bear the burden of our own flourishing. As a result, we are forced to anchor our sense of belonging, our significance and our purpose to two things that are intrinsically unreliable: Our own efforts at work and the volatility of man-made cultural, political, economic, social and moral systems.

Divinely Endowed

Our individual and collective experience reveals a ground-breaking truth – that belonging must be transcendentally anchored, significancemust be eternally grounded and purpose must be divinely endowed.

When we consider these three truths, the Christian message comes roaring to life.

The message of Jesus Christ is the only way through which forgiveness, significance and divine purpose are offered freely alongside adoption into the eternal family of God.

Through him, we are promised eternal belonging, enduring identity and divinely endowed purpose.

The fact that this unique offer of relationship comes freely through unconditional grace, simply adds an experiential cherry to the existential sundae.

As Marty the zebra himself discovers, true flourishing doesn’t come from within, it comes from without, and it is anchored not in effort but in relationship.

We all have that unconditional offer of a loving relationship with our Creator God through the person of Jesus Christ. Through Him, we are promised eternal belonging, enduring identity and divinely endowed purpose. That purpose – to be in loving relationship with God himself – is what so often alludes us amidst the haze of our failed self-actualization.

It is this divinely endowed purpose that the great thinker and writer St. Augustine referred to when he so powerfully wrote: “O’ God, you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

Like Marty, perhaps we need to make peace with the reality that we cannot ultimately control our environment or our circumstances – at work or anywhere else.

However, we have the incredible offer of flourishing through a relationship with God amidst the volatility of a broken world.

God himself came into the world – as Jesus Christ – to die on a cross for you, to give you the forgiveness you don’t deserve, the relationship you so deeply yearn for and the flourishing your heart seeks after.

As you approach the challenges, successes and opportunities at work that 2019 brings, remember: The key to flourishing in the 21^st century workplace begins by understanding that true flourishing cannot be achieved in the 21^st century workplace.

Our only hope for true flourishing is through relationship with Jesus Christ. Once we step into this relationship, we are freed to embrace challenges, enjoy successes and endure failures at work, secure in the assurance that our belonging, significance and purpose are anchored in the loving heart of God.

Article By Max Jeganathan

This article was originally published by Salt&Light on November 14, 2018.

http://www.rzim.org/

Although John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” was published in 1859, it continues to influence our thinking today. This is particularly true of the idea that human beings are essentially good. “Don’t tell me how to live!” essentially sums up Mill’s view of liberty. Yet in his essay, Mill not only tells us how we should live, but who we are. Human beings are essentially good, he declares, and his view of liberty hinges upon this idealistic perspective of human nature.

Many theologians and philosophers of Mill’s era were skeptical of the individual’s passions and one’s willingness to choose what is right over what is pleasurable. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, “[Mill] took for granted that those virtues that had already been acquired by means of religion, tradition, law, and all the other resources of civilization would continue to be valued and exercised.”

Today these structures of tradition and authority no longer hold sway in our culture, whereas the idea of the essential goodness of humanity has taken on a life of its own and is now embedded in our modern psyche. Moreover, the assumption held in Mill’s day—that truth is knowable and should order our lives—is no longer believed by many, who instead would agree with the words of Nietzsche: “Truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.”

In what has been a difficult teaching for every era, the Scriptures witness to the reality of sin and our need for God. Likewise, the experience of our world undeniably witnesses to the reality of darkness in our hearts. If this experience has not inspired a change in philosophy, perhaps it is because the illusion of human goodness brings us greater comfort. Yet, does it really? Do we not find it incomprehensible how one could abuse or torture a child? And do we really believe that given time and progress we will learn to love our neighbor as ourselves? Surely the horrors of the present century alone have proven the idea of the essential goodness of human beings to be false.

Jesus himself said in Mark 10, “No one is good except God alone.” But just before declaring this, Jesus showed us how we may know the power to love and to do good—by coming to him in humility, as children aware of their need for a Savior. “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them,” he said, “for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth: anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

Stuart McAllister is global support specialist at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

http://www.rzim.org/