“The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

When my seemingly endless energy as a young boy had become just a wee too much, my father would often use this phrase.

I remember being lost in my own world, lost in a world of my own energy in a time of (almost frantic) discovery.

Now as a father, I too see my children, living in a world of their own. My daughter in particular, now the advanced age of three, delights in telling me, in her own way, that she has reached a goal. “I can do it myself”,  she says, as she climbs up a foot stool to wash her teeth.

So often we can be lost in a world of ourselves that we feel like we have reached some magical point, some end goal, some achievement that has never been accomplished before. We can think we know it all, rather than some of “the all”.

My prayer for myself, and for you this night, is that we together can celebrate our great achievements, our gifts, and our strengths, but never feel we have arrived.

Let us raise our eyes beyond ourselves, to a world beyond ourselves, to a new journey of discovery.