Rise and Elevate the World: Thoughts on Living a Life of Great Consequence

By Chomba Chocho

Many people face this big question; “How do I live a life of great effect and consequence”? Resolving this question begins with clarifying your reason for living. It involves making  creative, courageous, and unconventional choices to pursue that reason for being in excellence. It requires taking an enduring legacy of inspiration to tomorrow. To achieve this, we must equip ourselves with the highest excellence of character that empowers us to meet our obligations of destiny to the world. 

Rise and Elevate the World explores this question and presents a case for a principle based, compassion inspired, and values driven model of personal change and growth. It builds a case for beyond the self thinking and ambitioning which makes an enduring difference in the world. The work also calls for the overcoming of the socially and culturally constructed boundaries to the unlimited growth possibilities which we all have. 

Rise and Elevate the World calls for making great decisions of great consequence. Decisions which reorient and repurpose the life to rise into the highest possibility of becoming while enriching the lives of the people in our orbits. It is about changing the world as we ascend into our highest and best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450207720

Chomba Chocho

Chomba Chocho is a Zambian born writer and poet. He has a Bachelors in Business Administration from Berea College and is currently working towards his MBA in Huntsville, Alabama. Passionate about the uplifting of humanity, he aspires to be a voice for positive personal and social change.

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Rise and Elevate the World

Thoughts on Living a

Life of Great Consequence

Chomba Chocho

Rise and Elevate the World

Thoughts on Living a Life of Great Consequence

Copyright © 2010 Chomba Chocho.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0771-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-0772-0 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 09/27/2023

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my family, in whom I have always found the constant expression of God’s extravagant mystery of divine love and my friends whose inspiration has lifted my life into the elevations of beauty

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: On the Eve of Great Consequence

Chapter 2: The Lonely Path

Chapter 3: From the Clutches of Fear

Chapter 4: In My Ashes

Chapter 5: For the Ordinary

Chapter 6: Eternal Intangibles

Chapter 7: A Mountain is Moving

Chapter 8: Transformational Influence

Chapter 9: Wasted Years

Chapter 10: Transcendence

Chapter 11: Greatness

Chapter 12: Radical Love

Chapter 13: The Obligations of Destiny

Chapter 14: Rising Humbly,

Dreaming Audaciously

Chapter 15: Stratosphere

Chapter 16: Change

Chapter 17: Legacy

Chapter 18: Rise

Epilogue

End Notes

Preface

This book is a collection of reflections about the life of great consequence. A life which makes the world better because it lived. The work reflects on how we can each pursue effective, engaged, and meaningful lives in today’s complex world.

Like most people, I have been around people who have left an indelible imprint on my life. A beautiful imprint, I must add. I have also seen ordinary people making radical sacrifices, living compassion driven lives, and changing their world. I have always been intrigued by the generosity of soul which characterizes the great lives which move the world. As a student of the lives of the great souls that I have met and seen in my life’s journey, I felt moved to share the lessons which I have learned from such lives. Lessons which have sparked my own experiment of growth.

To be sure, I have learned some life altering lessons about love and self giving from the important relationships of my life. I have come to learn that woven in the fabric of our everyday lives, are life lessons which can transform our lives. As ordinary as we are, we can do otherworldly things when we live to make other people’s lives better. Indeed, the world should be better because each one of us lived.

At the same time, I have seen people wander through life searching for meaning. Building dreams. Navigating life’s crises. I have also seen many people living below the capacity of their gifts and talents. Settling within the containers of conventionalism. I believe many people are being called to rise into living unconventional and compassion driven lives. In today’s challenging times, there is a call for the creative and courageous redesigning of many people’s lives. In the same way, many of us are being called to develop the traction needed to navigate today’s complex life crises. The life of consequence will nurture the fortitude to rise above life’s extremities. Those odds which always mark the path to any life’s destiny.

However, the most compelling lessons I have learned are from my faith. I have always been amazed by the wonder and extravagance of divine love. The epic transaction of God’s grace and heaven’s mysterious romance never cease to confound me. I believe that each one of us has a place in God’s dream for his children. Inspired by God’s love, we are to rise into God’s dream for our lives and the human family. That, I feel, is how we begin to live a life of great consequence.

Tragically, many of us barely begin to tap the great endowments of divine possibility which God has planted in us. Many of us live unfulfilled lives because we have not begun to tap the miracle of transformational becoming which God has planted in each one of us. This book reflects on how we can begin to mine the treasures which have been deposited in each one of us. I like to think that there are unending possibilities for character growth for those who place their lives on the path of change. Those possibilities are available to any and every person. Anyone who proceeds from divine creativity is slated for a life of great possibilities. All it takes is making choices to activate that great process of becoming.

This book is also a collection of thoughts resulting from seeing the world through two different set of eyes. Raised in the developing world and having lived for sometime in the western world, has made me see the world through a new set of realities. I have seen two worlds which are so different and yet so alike. I have noted the ironies of wealth and lack. Abundance and depravity. I have begun to see the connectedness of human beings and how that connectedness places unavoidable, love incurred debts on everyone who shares a part in the human experience. I have come to entertain the idea that our great civilization has not reached its moral potential as we have developed a self centered and narcissistic culture. True, the world is awash with the wonders of technological promise, and yet it generally lacks a compassionate soul.

A curiosity about what I think of as our shared paradoxes also motivated this book. It is interesting, for instance, that in a world where there are unthinkable crises of war, disease, or dehumanizing global poverty, there is a disturbing indifference to such issues. There is an indifference which is rooted in our contemporary consumer culture. As such, a key theme in this book is a reflection on the need for a radical generation of passionate people who will rise to make a difference in the world.

The book argues that success and accomplishment should be placed in this context. Consequential success has a transcendent and beyond the self quality. I have come to learn that people begin to succeed when they develop their spiritual and ethical potential. When their motivations are rooted in love. When they have clear life goals to live for. Goals which elevate the world.

This work thus imagines the transformational possibilities for ourselves and the world as we embrace spiritual and personal change as a responsibility. It develops the argument that excellence is an ethical obligation rooted in compassion. Indeed, excellence which is inspired by love changes lives and the world.

I also like to think that this book has something of a poetic heritage. Most of the themes in the book are inspired by the themes from my poetic reflections. Rather than present a collection of poems, I wanted to elaborate on the themes of my poetry. Still, this collection of thoughts largely remains a product of seeing the world through poetic eyes.

Rise and Elevate the World seeks to inspire a journey to a tipping point for consequential change. The work seeks to inspire a journey to that great life confluence of personal and spiritual transformation. A point of deep introspection where we begin to ask the big questions about our lives. Questions like: is there more to life than this? How can I redesign my life to have greater meaning? Have I lived my life the way it should be lived? What should my legacy and place in the world be?

I invite you into this journey of introspection and becoming. I invite you to ascend into the fullness of your calling. I invite you to make the world better with your life.

I invite you to rise and elevate the world.

Chapter 1

On the Eve of Great Consequence

Many people need to find their reason for being. For many people, finding that ultimate life goal is elusive. And yet, when you find your reason for being and pursue it with an excellence inspired by love, you can find meaning and fulfillment. You an also change the world.

We each have a life assignment to complete. In pursuing that grand life goal we surge upward and, with us, our world. Alternatively, we can be headed downward. This happens when you have not lived out your life as effectively as you should: when key life commitments are unfulfilled, critical milestones are unrealized, and years are wasted. Not living out your life’s purpose comes with a downward gravity of regret and lack of fulfillment. It also results in high quit rates on life.

To be sure, many lives are sliding downwards into flattened out life experiences which lack fulfillment. As would be expected, this is a pressing call for introspection for many people. Life often demands that we reach a critical tipping point for change where we make courageous and creative decisions which alter the course of our lives.

At some point in our lives, we must make the choice to rise into the ascendance of great consequence. We must make decisions to set our lives on a new course of purposefulness. We must decide to live consequential lives. Lives which are driven by compassion in the pursuit of a clear reason for living. Lives which make the world better because they lived. We must make the choice to grow into our highest and best. In order to be of any eternal worth, that growth should enrich the world, in a small or big way.

As a result, we must constantly confront the need for new beginnings. In fact, every so often, new beginnings become necessary for the kind of transformation which gets our lives back on their paths of destiny. We must always confront the need for renewal in order to experience the elevation needed to complete our God given life tasks.

Still, many people need to clarify their life’s essence. Many people also desire to live lives of transcendence. This means that we must eventually come to a decisive turning point in our lives. One where we make choices which rearrange the makeup of our priorities and change the trajectories of our lives. It is at that great turning point of our lives where we begin to challenge our assumptions about what or who we can become.

What happens at those life altering moments should overhaul our lives. It should change our lives and our place in the world. A new world of possibilities should open before us. As you begin to search for your reason for living, you begin to rise into God’s dream for you and your world. As you rise into that divine dream for your life, you also begin to elevate your world in transforming beauty. But first, you need to ask some big questions.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

After traveling through the years, we must eventually get to an eve of great consequence where we ask and answer the big questions about our lives. We need to ask questions like: am I living the life that I was meant to live? Have I been all that I was created to be? Have I made good on my obligations of destiny? Can I redeem the lost years? What use do I make of the rest of my life? What is my legacy going be? What is my role and place in the world?

This is something of a mountain top experience where we see our selves in the context of our larger universe and evaluate the effectiveness of our place in it. When we reach our personal mountain tops of change, we need to begin re evaluating our roles in our relationships and the world. At our mountain tops of change, we will usually find that we could have done more to be our best selves and to make a difference.

What we are really grappling with when we engage in this kind of introspection are issues of finding meaning, purpose, and direction. Whenever the big questions resulting from our quest for meaning are not clarified, we are invariably left with a sense of tragic