Tethering Parental Ambition

I was a newbie to the play group, so I mostly listened to the chatter of the other women. The conversations were what you’d expect: discussions about their children’s latest developmental milestones, information about the best local preschools, and a lot of refereeing of toddlers dueling for sole possession of a toy truck. It began to dawn on me as I listened to the adult conversation that the toddlers weren’t the only ones in the room who were trying to win. 

While it wasn’t anywhere near the level of an Olympic swim meet or a real-estate bidding war, that a sense of competition existed at all among a group of first-time parents caught me by surprise. It probably shouldn’t have. The human condition includes vulnerable places where insecurity and self-doubt take up residence. Competition can be one way we attempt to override those uncomfortable feelings, and becoming a parent can be fraught with insecurity even for the most self-assured. We want to do what’s best for our kids. The seemingly endless torrent of advice on everything from breastfeeding to diaper brands to parenting styles comes from every direction: peers, family members, parades of experts.

As I continued through the early years of stay-at-home, fulltime childrearing, I kept encountering competition in unexpected places. It took me a while to name what was fueling that competition, and longer still to see it at work in myself.

It was ambition. 

Ambition and competition have a symbiotic relationship; it’s easy to see how they manifest themselves in sports, politics, business, the classroom, and the entertainment world. But being a stay-at-home mom seemed as though I was living a simple life relatively untouched by ambition. After all, there were no ladders to climb in the preschool carpool pick-up line – or were there?  I discovered that ambition reared its head in all sorts of places, including food pantry volunteer teams, homeowners’ association boards, and homeschool support groups.

Photograph by Aleksandra / Adobe Stock.

Ambition can be a friend. It fuels us as we move into our early adult years, propelling us toward engagement with the world and helping us begin to figure out our place in the world. Ambition can motivate us to persevere through challenges: pushing through a difficult college course, decoding organizational politics, or putting in ten thousand hours of practice to gain mastery of a skill.  

But ambition is a highly combustible fuel that is often is ignited by vice. South African author Mokokoma Mokhonoana said, “Ambition is greed rebranded.”

The sly nature of ambition first came into focus for me at church, though it was well-disguised in the language of Doing Great Things for God, servant leadership, and sacrificial service. We baptize ambition by immersing it in spiritual-sounding language, then elevate Christian subculture’s winners: best women’s ministry, biggest church, most podcast followers. I saw aspiration as I watched people jockey for access to the congregation’s inner leadership circle. And I saw its darker side as those who wanted access excused and enabled a spiritually abusive pastor. The personal ambitions of those in a toxic organization’s inner circle tend to be deployed to protect and preserve the status quo. 

Jesus reveals much about the nature of ambition when he calls out the Pharisees in Matthew 23. Instead of encouraging their precise, color-in-the-lines religious prescriptiveness, Jesus unmasks it. “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others” (Matt. 23:5–7).

It is humility that reins in and directs ambition in a healthy way.

And when this motivation is rewarded with social position and spiritual authority, it taps into the ambitions at work in others. It certainly did in Paul’s life before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. In his letter to his friends at Philippi, he listed the spiritual résumé shaped by his ambition before crumpling it into a ball and tossing it aside: “ … circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ” (Phil. 3:5–7).

I don’t hear in these words a call to kill all ambition, but to recognize its nature. For example, I’ve been writing for publication for a long time. I believe the drive to communicate, to challenge, and to inspire is a gift from God. But I have come to see that simmering jealousy over another writer’s success, or a good long wallow in self-pity after an unexpected rejection, has its genesis in my own ambition when it is untethered from godly humility.

It is humility that reins in and directs ambition in a healthy way. Earlier in his letter to the Philippians, Paul’s hymn (Phil. 2:6–11) describing Jesus’ willing choice to empty himself of his divine privilege to serve and redeem humankind offers both a model of humility and a way toward finding freedom from the demands of our ambition. The liberty found in humility is bound completely in our relationship with Jesus.

As I’ve pondered the role ambition plays in my life, I recognize that I’ve often conflated humility with humiliation, which is another way of saying that I believed accepting shame, not humility, might be the cure. I simply wasn’t sure how to rein in my own ambitions. Did I need to vanquish them entirely? Maybe being willing to be a loser is the fast track to Christlike humility.

There are plenty of times when this is true – going the second mile, turning the other cheek, and forgiving enemies don’t look anything like winning as the world would assess it. But learning humility also means being willing to allow the Spirit to sensitize me to the subtle rev of envy or insecurity that fires a competitive response in me in everyday work, social, church, or online exchanges.

One remedy for the hubris of Doing Great Things for God is doing everyday things with God. Seventeenth-century Carmelite Brother Lawrence, who wrote the spiritual classic The Practice of the Presence of God, detailed the intimacy with God he discovered working in the kitchen of the monastery. In his youth, he was a soldier, then worked in the household of a government official – both perfect staging grounds for ambition. He entered religious life at age twenty-six, and experienced God’s companionship peeling potatoes and preparing simple meals for his brothers. His writing showed me that trying to deny my ambition wouldn’t quell it. Instead, seeking God’s companionship in the invisible and the mundane bits of daily life – changing a diaper, cleaning a toilet, or shuttling kids to soccer practice – offered me a way to begin to identify and form a new relationship with ambition and with God himself. 

My three children are now in their late thirties. The complexities of raising individual human beings have cauterized over time the ambition-fueled anxiety and hubris that I first met in myself at the play group’s Mommy Sweepstakes half a lifetime ago. As I’ve practiced quietly making the choice to opt out of those no-win parenting games in conversations, sports, and school activities, I’ve discovered that healthy ambition looks a lot like love: it is generous, generative, and unselfish. And it is only possible to be fueled by ambition without self-combusting as I tether myself to the One whose sole ambition is perfect love for each one of us.