Your True Commitment

It may well take an entire a lifetime to determine your true commitment. Commitment is your staying power, what keeps you in a relationship, moving ahead, hanging in, staying afloat, striving, wrestling. Ultimately, the life you build for yourself and others day by day is founded on your commitment.

As the underpinning of love relationships, commitment is threefold. You commit to yourself, to the other and to the relationship. The question is, which should come first, second and third? Is it to be you, the other or the relationship first? To prosper in love, the priority needs to be the relationship first, followed by a virtual tie between you and the other.

Commitment is a surrender to purpose. The greater the purpose, the greater must be your commitment. You are committed to someone or something for the sake of some end. Your primary commitment may change, of course, during your lifetime. Sometimes you may stay too long in a relationship; other times you quit too soon. Yet both are learning experiences.

The depth of your roots in a relationship determines the quantity and quality of its fruit, as well as your staying power in that relationship when rough times come. This makes commitment like a “drill-bit” by which you may penetrate the resistant ground of your soul, opening it to the treasures of mutual life. Only your commitment will see you through to the planting and harvesting of such satisfying fruit. In life as in love, only that which you are committed enough to keep working at and remaining in will grant you satisfaction.

Commitment does not arise or long live without sufficient reason and means. Love is commitment’s finest reason for being; and faith is commitment’s time- tested means to fulfillment. Faith, love and commitment are inseparable. Where faith is love’s encourager, commitment is love’s builder. The work of faith is to turn us to one another and enable us to persevere in openness; the task of commitment is to build the bridge on faith’s foundation between ourselves and our loved ones.

Without commitment, love cannot find a safe dwelling place. For like a house, commitment is designed to withstand the extremities of weather, so that those who abide within it may continue to live and even thrive regardless of external conditions.

“Commit” comes from the Latin “committere,” which means “to connect, entrust,” and is derived from the combination of “com,” meaning “together,” and “mittere,” meaning “to send.” To commit means, first, to send together; that is, to move toward connection. It is a “from – to” movement of the will, from present separation toward future unity. The essential word and will of commitment is this: “These things shall be – together. Toward that end will I work.” Success is follow-through; commitment empowers follow-through.

Second, to commit means to entrust. The “en” intensifies the trust; the en prefix signifies the actual putting into effect of the trust itself. Thus to commit means to move into trust and to bring trust into full implementation.

Third, to commit means to carry out or perpetrate a deed. More than word and will, to commit signifies the doing as such.

Bringing together, keeping together, trusting, doing – all of these are included in the essential meaning of commitment. Our culture rises and falls with our willingness to commit ourselves to something greater than ourselves.