Successful or Significant?

24 hours from now I will be boarding a plane to spend some sweet time in sunny Mexico. I am so looking forward to 8 days of sunshine, the Caribbean Sea, and of course, a Mexican man named Paco bringing me slushy fruity ice drinks and waiting on me hand and foot. I so love vacations. When I vacation, I like to do it big. I work extremely hard, so why not play just as hard, right? Truthfully, the reason I'm so looking forward to vacation is that I get some time to breathe and take in a little piece of God. In the past couple of weeks, my family has had quite a scare with my brother, Steven. He's the oldest in our family. He was the bane of my existence as a child. I am the youngest - and easily provoked - and he knew how to push all my buttons, ugh! I would be watching TV, and he would come up behind me and do this wrestling move on me called the "full nelson". He would say, "Sabrine, I am the master. Just try and get out of my death force grip". There I would be - probably about 80 lbs. of me - trying to get out of my brother's "death force grip". He was a little bigger than me and a lot stronger. Those are the memories I thought of two weeks ago as I drove 5 hours to Allentown, PA where he lives. I was going there in a hurry because he had been sick and developed a very series blood infection. He was in very critical condition in the ICU after collapsing at home. I tried to think of positive things as I made the drive with my sister. It was a very scary time for me, and yet, as prayers were answered and he kept getting better, I had to reflect on the very seriousness of the brevity of life. I'm 37 years old - and am not too inclined to want to think about the brevity of life, but there it was staring me in the face. It's a scary thought - we are seriously, as the Bible says, "but a vapor". Times like that and vacations bring me to a place where I think about how short life is and what am I doing to make an impact. Am I making an impact? I could be very successful at life, but am I making it significant? Jesus' life was short, not successful by world standards, but it was significant. As His daughter, my prayer would be that I would make a significant impact on life - not just be successful. Isn't that the great commandment after all?