I was meeting with a friend for lunch recently, and we were talking about a speaking tour ahead next year.

I’ll be in Rome and Greece during April, and I’ll be in Cordoba, Argentina in May.

When I go to Rome I’ll be speaking to a group of gestalt therapists about the life and thinking of Karol Wojtyla, the Cardinal of Poland who later became Pope John Paul II. He confronted fascists and totalitarianism in various forms at different times, and his book, ‘The Acting Person’, is a philosophical description of some of the beliefs that supported his social activism.

They also harmonise well with a life lived by faith in God. Just a few days after that conference, I’ll be in Spetses, Greece, where a conclave of leaders of gestalt therapy training centres will be meeting, and I will co-facilitate a group presentation titled “Devils, Angels, or Simply Irrelevant? How Beliefs Affect Our Institutional Lives”.

That will be about the influence of spiritual beliefs on what we do in the training and supervision of new therapists in various parts of the world.

Finally, in May I’ll present to a large conference of about 800 therapists in Argentina on the role of faith in the life and work of a gestalt therapist.

These were opportunities that came, and I seized them. Why? Why not let them pass? What purpose might they serve? Perhaps someone else would have said, “Phew! No thanks. I’d rather not spend the time, the energy, and the money.”

Not me. It’s irresistible to address people on themes of importance.

So, my friend asked a very important question. He said: “How will you know that you succeeded?” And that stumped me.

It just seems to me that God provides opportunities. They can become one’s next steps in life, and a person’s job is to keep pace, not to do post mortems of these projects in hindsight. I, for one, am not used to evaluating God on such things.

Still, it was such a good question that I decided to think and talk it over with God so He might help me understand better how to recognise success in the spiritual realm.

I know that God does not look at things the same way we do. When David was chosen king in Israel, the prophet Samuel went through every other member of his family looking for someone who looked like a king before he came to David, who, having come fresh from taking care of sheep, looked anything but regal. God reminded Samuel that He looked upon a person’s heart.

God can see inside us to what we really are, and nothing fools Him. So, God does not judge by appearances.

He would not be moved by the art of the Sistine Chapel or the charm of a Greek island. He would be drawn to the state of mind behind the eyes of a painter or the broken spirit coming in sincere humility.

Jesus reminded people that true religion was not in the splendour of the temple, but in such things as visiting prisoners in jail and feeding the poor.

Many young people in what is known as emerging churches are rediscovering this as they seek to live lives of service in the world, not because it gains them an audience by which they might sell someone a salvation message, but because service is what true religion is really about. Period. Jesus came to serve, not to be served. He sacrificed Himself completely in the process. Paul encouraged people to give their whole selves as living sacrifices, which he called their spiritual service — their expression of worship. Most times what we might naturally regard to be success is not success at all. God’s ways are not our ways.

So, how could I possibly know if anything I did fit into His plan for the universe? Is it possible to conduct outcome studies on the work of God in a person’s life? Psychologists engage in research to evaluate the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Therapists are wise to do their own outcomes evaluations to see if what they are doing is working.

Do those in ministry also attend to the results of what they do? I think traditionally they have, but I wonder if sometimes the outcomes studies religious people have done have not really missed something. When churches keep tallies of how many people attend or how much money is given in the offering, that is certainly one way to evaluate whether Sunday was a success. However, it strikes me as judging by appearances rather than looking to the heart of the matter.

At this point I think faithfulness to one’s calling, the vision of what God is putting together, and yielding to God’s timing and process are essential. The success must be, after all, God’s success. The privilege is, on occasion, to be caught up in a work of God so that one can look back in hindsight and marvel.