appreciating the difference between successful and fruitful.

I'm participating in a 31-day blogging challenge called reverb10, responding to writing prompts that are designed to elicit reflections on 2010, and hopes for 2011. You can find out more about it here. I am challenging myself to respond to each prompt in 15 minutes or less.

Today's challenge: Appreciate – What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

 

Fruitfulness

This year, I have come to fully appreciate the difference between fruitfulness and success. Between being an expert and being an example, an advocate, learner, a friend, a collaborator, a confidante, an artist, an explorer, a human being.

My friend Kathryn Ruth Schuth reminded me of this quote by Henri Nouwen a few days ago:

"There is a great difference between successful and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness." -Henri Nouwen

I express ongoing gratitude for this learning by remaining in choice, by continuing to voice my shared poverty, by choosing the intimacy that grows through touching one another's wounds over the assuredness of expert, and by tenderly touching the edges of our shared brokenness.

[photo from my visit to Mighty Tieton in Tieton, Washington]