How do you know you're at the top? When have you achieved?

   Many youth are striving to get to the top but their definitions of success are thwarted.

   Some buildings have wings that ascend to different heights. While one building may have 10 floors another wing may have fifteen or more. Elevators in the shorter building can't take riders to the top of the extended floor, only to the top of its building. Reaching the top floor in the first building doesn’t get you to the maximum height available, to get to the highest level riders have to change elevators.

    In that sense youth definitions of success seem dependent upon which elevator they are riding. Some can take them a portion of the way, others can take just so far; then they stop.

    A 2010 song by Lil Wayne is entitled, Right above it. It features Wayne bragging about his success, his women and his fame. He brags that he knows he's at the top because he's reached a point where only heaven is above him. The main lyrical hook says,

    "Now tell me how you love it, you know you at the top when only heaven's right above it."

    He extolled his airplane flights filled with women and his "Bollywood flow." Yet, there is a touch of sadness as Wayne says, "My real friends never hear from me. My fake friends write the wrong answers on the mirror for me." He is popular and sought after but he said he doesn't run with different crews, he and some of those close to him walk the same path but "got on different shoes."

    True believers don't focus on the life that Lil Wayne projects, but they are focused on the life that's right above it. It's life on a higher plane and higher ground. It's a life free of the clubs, and drugs, and fast living. It's a life not dependent on glitz and bling and shiny things.

     Young believers may be walking the same social path by accident of social circumstance, but young believers should have different crews and be wearing different shoes, the gospel shoes that destined toward the Canaan land.

     As Christians, our quest is higher ground. We desire more than fake friends and empty relationships that the world offers. We desire the life above it, but that world only comes through Christ.