I’m trying to make the best crème brûlée. My husband is trying to make the best smoked old-fashioned. Our high schoolers are trying to earn the best grades. Our Chiefs want to be the best football team. And our church is trying to be the most inclusive and graciously welcoming church in town. Is there ever a moment when our striving gets in the way of what brings us closer to the ultimate goal? Why do we want to be superior anyway? What are you striving for?

Miroslov Volf directs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and has spoken at Country Club multiple times over the years. His most recent book is “The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better than Others Makes Us Worse.”  It’s a provocative title and seems to bump up against what many of us take for granted. I haven’t finished the book, but I’m challenged by what I’ve read so far. I recently had a chance to visit with Volf, and he said that ambition is like a flame. It can ignite you to get going. But it can also burn you.

In the book, Volf writes: “Striving for superiority is striving to be better than someone else-and, as a rule, to be recognized by others as better. Striving for superiority differs from striving for excellence, in which persons strive to achieve some good independently of how they compare with others.”

I read this week that one of the scientists who won the Nobel Prize was unable to receive the news for a couple of days because he was on vacation with his wife and had turned off his phone. He was clearly striving to be a great scientist, but not striving to win a prize. In what ways does our striving to be better than someone else eventually turn sour? Does the lawyer get burned out? The soccer player injured? The retiree disillusioned?

Volf touches a chord in American life when he writes: “Striving for superiority is at its worst when it becomes the dominant value to which most – and in extreme cases, all – other values are subordinated. It then becomes a nearly incurable vice.”

I am appreciating Volf’s book because he calls me back to consider what matters to God more than what matters to the dominant culture.

Grace and Peace,
Carla