What are your top values?

Currently working my way through Dr John Demartini's book The Values Factor.

I have been to his seminars and love his story of overcoming poverty, dyslexia and lack of direction to doing what he does today: travelling the world and teaching.

His book has sat on my shelf for a few years, and only last week did I begin to read it in earnest and to ask myself: do I really know what my top values are? Am I living my life in harmony with these values? Am I setting goals that align with these values? Does my work and my business represent my highest expression and fulfillment of these values?

The first question has stumbled me for a long time, and I am still getting to the point where I can confidently declare "Yes! This is what I believe. This is what is most important to me. This is what my life is about." I realized I was easily able to come up with my top 10 values, but I could not order them with conviction, because that would mean having to decide that X is higher than Y and so on down the list.

My lack of clarity and conviction hit home most painfully when a social media marketing expert whose 7-day challenge I'd responded to rang me on the weekend to chat about my business and I realized, oops, there's other stuff I'm more interested in at the moment than talking business. I even had difficulty articulating with conviction what it is I do, when just the day before, I'd enthusiastically put up my hand for his challenge.

What's wrong with me? Why do I keep swinging like a pendulum between what I want to do and what I feel I should do? Could it be that this is a clue about my highest values?

Then early this morning, I picked up Tim Keller's The Reason for God, which has been sitting on my bedside table for weeks. I'd been reading it conscientiously, then moved on to other books (as you do) and forgot all about it. And now I opened the book to the bit where Tim talks about the difference between Christianity and other religions, and what sin really is. The long and short is, that whenever I put anything else as the most important thing in my life: career, family, professional achievement, money, status - that is not God, that is idolatry ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me" - the first Commandment) and therefore sin. Because I cannot save myself or improve myself by my own efforts. The only way I can be made right with God is by accepting that God has already done the work for me through Jesus Christ, and only by turning my life completely over to Him can I find that happy place between feeling superior to others and feeling not good enough.

So now I am looking at my top four values again, and I realize God's not in the list.

How now, brown cow?