I work well by myself. I also work well in task oriented jobs. I enjoy the challenge of being given a list of things to do and see how fast I can get those things done. I grew up working in the restaurant industry, so whether it was making the double stack that showed up on the order screen, bussing the table of sixteen, or buttering and garlic-ing breadsticks, I thrived. I have often said that I would love to be an Amazon driver, getting my list, popping my headphones in, and seeing how efficient I could be on my routes.
While there is benefit to having this mindset in the workforce, at times it has brought shortcomings in my spiritual life. Because the Catholic faith is a relationship between God and His people, an individualistic, task driven mindset does little to foster what God truly wants: Me to give Him my heart.
For much of my life growing up, I have had an ordered life. My prayer was structured, and I always strove to ‘do the right thing’ by following Catholic morality. Yet, after examining the lack of fruit that is promised by the Gospels, I began to evaluate what I was doing wrong.
After some strong doses of humility, I realized that my prayer life was not a relationship with God, but was all about me. I enjoyed setting prayer goals and accomplishing them. I took pride in having a strong will in doing the right thing. I wondered why the world couldn’t be more like me (Praise the Lord that it wasn’t).
I was a modern day Pharisee. I was self assured of my salvation because of all the good things I was able to accomplish. And I often accomplished them on my own, taking on the mentality of letting everyone do their own thing while I did mine. This, of course, led to a competitive mentality with other famous Christian or Catholics. I was doing the same thing as them so why couldn’t I be recognized for my goodness? I spent hours being critical to others in my mind and with my words, just to make myself feel better. Of course, I hid this disposition from the public because it would be unbecoming of a Catholic to act this way.
But then I started reading scripture daily, and going to spiritual direction monthly. I began to form a community in and around my parish and my children’s Catholic school. God took me out of a career of ministry and gave me a job that I viewed as less important. Gone were the days of gaining admiration from my coworkers and those I was ministering to. Gone were the days of completing tasks for my employer’s praise. God made me spiritually poor. I could not take pride in my work. All I had left was to do the thing that God wanted from the start: to give him, my family, and my community my heart.
I still struggle from time to time with my efficiency mentality. Whether it creeps into my prayer life or whenever I am creating art, I have the temptation to take more pride in getting something done, than doing something well. But what I have learned as I have opened my heart to a relationship with God is that the world that He created is meant to be a qualitative experience. We are tricked into thinking that life is all about quantity because the world that man has created is controlled by money, and who can produce the most in an efficient manner is promised to rule the day. But when we are able to break through that noise and allow ourselves to humbly be with God and His Word, we know that what matters is being with Him, and all of our actions (efficient or not) will flow from that. So as we live in a world that wants to utilize whatever it can in the technology realm to maximize output for the sake of personal gain, let us remember that a relationship with God and others is not a task to be completed, but a place to linger and be consumed in love.