Your Legacy:Will you be remembered for great skill or for intense love?

In most self-help courses there is a theme of believe in yourself. The idea is to focus on a goal, marshal your strengths and work each day towards success.

I've always believed in that. My first years of preaching were passionately possessed by the ideal of being good at it!

My public speaking models included a wide variety of styles like John F. Kennedy, Adolph Hitler and Winston Churchill. I preach the Bible and I'm always reminded that love is a powerful theme within it. Thus I'm challenged by a higher goal than effective preaching.

God communicates more through love than He does through skill.

Charles Ludwig Dodgson, an English Mathematician, worked hard at his subject. He wrote a commentary on Euclidean Math in 1879. He was 47 years old and 20 years from his death. He called it Euclid and His Modern Rivals.

I don't know anyone who's read the book!

Not that it was bad.

Dodgson was an Oxford Don and brilliant among his peers. He cut a slim, austere figure, was deeply religious, abstemious and disciplined, rigorously intellectual, and mannerly. He lectured at Christchurch. The math was profound but the verbal presentation was horrible! Only very determined students could stay the course. Every year his classes waned in attendance. Even his book takes effort to read.

Charles wanted to be an Episcopal (Anglican) minister but his shy disposition and his terrible stammer precluded him from the calling. His father was the Canon of Ripon. His friends were pastors and priests. He enjoyed church, but in adult company his tongue consistently failed his profound understanding.

He found that he was most at ease in the company of children.

At 22 Dodgson would tell seaside stories to the kids at Whitby, Yorkshire. Somehow they overlooked his stuttering presentation and were enthralled by his amazing, colorful tales. His passion may have been math but his joy was the delight his stories brought to children. His love for the kids brought out much in the way of creative imagination. Sometimes he'd begin the story with no idea how it would unfold.

On July 4,1862 Dodgson and a friend went on a rowboat ride with the three children of a fellow Oxford lecturer. The middle child's name was Alice Liddell. Some time that afternoon Charles made up a story and chose Alice as the central character.

A chain of events was set in motion that has led to lasting fame for the Oxford mathematician. Dodgson published the story, a sequel and other subsequent works of wit and nonsense under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, a Latinized re-ordering of his second and first names.

Today Alice in Wonderland is a child's tale that spans the globe. Translations continue to proliferate.

His skill was Math but it was his love for the youngsters that became his greatest contribution to the world. It was only after his death that his books became international best sellers.

That could happen to you too.

The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 13 that the greatest of all is love. A century from now it may not be your name on the project or the office door that will be remembered, but rather how much love you showed.

The only thing that counts for eternity is faith expressing itself through love.

Visit that Bible chapter again. Allow the understanding to dawn on you afresh. No matter what you know, say, do, believe or feel there is no lasting worth unless you are also a self-sacrificing, others focused, God glorifying lover.

It's not how much love you've received that matters.

Make the quantity of love you can pack into each day your magnificent obsession. Knowing God is the great reservoir of love for God is Love.