I can point to so many individuals—writers, musicians, artists, sportsmen and women, business people, political leaders—whose successes inspire me. Each has lived a life of devotion to their field. And many “heroes” serve in fields less visible yet no less vital: education, religion, policing, the military, civil rights, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and so on.

Yet regardless of the visible good we’re achieving, or regret not achieving, we accomplish a great deal each day if our experience includes spiritual growth—the willingness to rise from a material to a spiritual sense of existence. To faithfully follow the Bible’s counsel to “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), is in itself a successful life of growing in our understanding and proof of what we are as God’s, Spirit’s, creation.

Doing this is success in the context of our own well-being. Gaining in the knowledge of God’s nature and our true relation to God brings us healing and clarity about our purpose. But it’s also success that reaches beyond our own lives. What our neighbors near and far most need is for limited, worldly thinking to increasingly give way to a scientific, spiritual understanding of reality: to the knowledge and experience of God’s presence and power. Each time we grow in our grasp of this, the balance of human consciousness shifts in this direction. These shifts, no matter how modest, are transformational.