Faithful and Successful

Curtis Martin, the founder of Focus, which is a Catholic outreach group to college students, which has been enormously successful in a very short period of time over the past 10 years. He gave a talk in Philadelphia over the weekend, where he pointed out two things that really struck me. First, he said many Catholics misunderstand Mother Teresa's famous quote, "We are called to be faithful not successful," That is true, if we are called to choose, we should always choose Faithfulness. We should always choose to be faithful to God, to our vocation, etc., before we choose success. But in a normal life, we should seek both. In fact Psalm 118 says, "O Lord grant us salvation, O Lord grant us success." So many Catholics fear going for success in the world, because they have a mistaken view of humility. We should seek both, Faithfulness and Success. The more we expand ourselves, the more we will become the best version of ourselves, and if you don't believe that God wants you to become the best version of yourself, than you probably have a mistaken view of not only humility, but of God. He created us with infinite love and infinite wonder, its ok to seek out success, as long as we stay faithful in the process.
The other point he made that really stuck with me, was to use our gift of Creativity. Think about how creative God is, look at the ocean, the sky, the mountains, the human person and you have to be struck by how creative God is. We are made in God's image and Likeness, therefore our potential for creativity is boundless. All we have to do is ask!