It’s a great feeling when you achieve a goal.  We had been driving for several hours and we stopped at the New River Gorge Ranger station.  We thought it would be good to hike down to the lower observation point and let the children get some exercise.  To an adult 178 steps may not seem like a big achievement but for a two year old it’s a challenge – especially considering that the steps are about where her knees are.

As you can see in the picture, Susanna loved it!  She hiked all the way down and all the way up unassisted and I think she felt good about her achievement.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”  There is an intrinsic reward in achievement.  Achievement does not need to stop as you grow older unless you want to stop growing.  The truth is unless you do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will not grow.  Saint Augustine gives us a good perspective:

If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are.  For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained.  Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.   What you are must always displease you, it you would attain to that which you are not.  

What is a significant achievement you’re working on?  One of the greatest theologians of Christianity, the Apostle Paul, wrote this,

Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.  (Philippians 3:13-14)

Keep pressing on and may you experience the joy of achievement!