How to Build Business and Become a Saint
You can build your business and become a saint at the same time. I know this it true. How can it not be true? How can your work and your spiritual life oppose each other? Yet even as I understand this intellectually, it does sometimes seem impossible to do both the way I know I should.
Sometimes, indeed, it seems like building a business and becoming a saint conflict. I'm so busy with my work, I don't take the time I should in my prayer life. Or I'm so preoccupied with my work that when I do pray - or perform any of the other "norms of piety" I try to perform each day - I'm just not paying attention to what I'm doing. It's a real dilemma. Maybe you've faced this dilemma too from time to time.
You see, the thing is I know that becoming a saint is what all of us are called to. Indeed there's no purpose to life that supersedes knowing, loving and serving God. And yet, here I am pressed every day to produce the work demanded my business's customers. And it was no different when I worked for someone else - except that I had to satisfy my customers as well as my (sometimes unreasonably demanding or obnoxious) boss.
Okay, so how about we tackle this problem by first acknowledging the fact that there are 24 hours in a day as well as the fact that we know we should devote some portion of those hours to God. (How many times I've talked about this!) We need to read Scripture, read some spiritual work, study the teaching of the Church (doctrinal study); we need to take some time to meditate - time we spend quietly, alone with God; we should get to Confession at least once a month, to Mass as many times as we can during the week, in addition to our Sunday Mass obligation. And these are just the basics!
Meanwhile, if you work for someone else, unless you've got some kind of "cushy" job, demands are made on you all the time to produce work that will bring in or enhance your companies revenues. If you own your own business, customers need to be served if you want to stay in business. Unless you're independently wealthy, you probably face long and hard hours of work each day. In that light, what we just outlined as the "basics" of living our lives as faithful Catholics, knowing, loving and serving God, may seem at times to be impossible - or darn near so.
If you actually think along these lines - basically that it's virtually impossible to meet the demands of your work and do what God expects, I hope you realize that you need to straighten out your thinking. I hope you know that God never asks more from us than it is possible for us to do. If you don't know this, it means you don't really know your Catholic Faith and you don't know God - which means you've got a big problem.
Of course, even if you do know the truth here, you can still sometimes slip into this way of thinking. For me, it happens if my work makes extreme demands on my time. And it happens when it seems like I'm really not giving the time or attention (or both) I should to God. But when this happens, I've learned a little "trick" that helps me straighten out my thinking.
What I do is remind myself that I can't build my business in a day and I can't become a saint in a day. Simple as that. It helps me remember that I'll never in this life reach a point where somehow things just "click" once and for all. Every day presents a new challenge and I'll have to struggle to meet that challenge, whether in building my business or in becoming a saint. And I'll probably struggle this way for the rest of my life. And so my business success and my holiness meet there in the daily struggle.
And when the struggle seems endless, like it's too much, when it feels like I can't take another step, either because I'm facing some gigantic problem or I'm just plain exhausted from dealing with a gigantic problem, I remind myself not to rely on myself. I remember that whenever I rely on myself, I focus on myself and that just feeds my pride. Besides, it hardly ever results in success either in dealing with my business or my spiritual life. So it's "Father, help me! I can't do this on my own!"
And with that (and it's taken me years and years of trying to even get to the point of trusting God in this way) I place the eventual success or failure of any particular endeavor in His Hands and just get on with my prayer life and my work life best I can this day. When I do that, I realize I can both build my business and become a saint.
Sometimes, indeed, it seems like building a business and becoming a saint conflict. I'm so busy with my work, I don't take the time I should in my prayer life. Or I'm so preoccupied with my work that when I do pray - or perform any of the other "norms of piety" I try to perform each day - I'm just not paying attention to what I'm doing. It's a real dilemma. Maybe you've faced this dilemma too from time to time.
You see, the thing is I know that becoming a saint is what all of us are called to. Indeed there's no purpose to life that supersedes knowing, loving and serving God. And yet, here I am pressed every day to produce the work demanded my business's customers. And it was no different when I worked for someone else - except that I had to satisfy my customers as well as my (sometimes unreasonably demanding or obnoxious) boss.
Okay, so how about we tackle this problem by first acknowledging the fact that there are 24 hours in a day as well as the fact that we know we should devote some portion of those hours to God. (How many times I've talked about this!) We need to read Scripture, read some spiritual work, study the teaching of the Church (doctrinal study); we need to take some time to meditate - time we spend quietly, alone with God; we should get to Confession at least once a month, to Mass as many times as we can during the week, in addition to our Sunday Mass obligation. And these are just the basics!
Meanwhile, if you work for someone else, unless you've got some kind of "cushy" job, demands are made on you all the time to produce work that will bring in or enhance your companies revenues. If you own your own business, customers need to be served if you want to stay in business. Unless you're independently wealthy, you probably face long and hard hours of work each day. In that light, what we just outlined as the "basics" of living our lives as faithful Catholics, knowing, loving and serving God, may seem at times to be impossible - or darn near so.
If you actually think along these lines - basically that it's virtually impossible to meet the demands of your work and do what God expects, I hope you realize that you need to straighten out your thinking. I hope you know that God never asks more from us than it is possible for us to do. If you don't know this, it means you don't really know your Catholic Faith and you don't know God - which means you've got a big problem.
Of course, even if you do know the truth here, you can still sometimes slip into this way of thinking. For me, it happens if my work makes extreme demands on my time. And it happens when it seems like I'm really not giving the time or attention (or both) I should to God. But when this happens, I've learned a little "trick" that helps me straighten out my thinking.
What I do is remind myself that I can't build my business in a day and I can't become a saint in a day. Simple as that. It helps me remember that I'll never in this life reach a point where somehow things just "click" once and for all. Every day presents a new challenge and I'll have to struggle to meet that challenge, whether in building my business or in becoming a saint. And I'll probably struggle this way for the rest of my life. And so my business success and my holiness meet there in the daily struggle.
And when the struggle seems endless, like it's too much, when it feels like I can't take another step, either because I'm facing some gigantic problem or I'm just plain exhausted from dealing with a gigantic problem, I remind myself not to rely on myself. I remember that whenever I rely on myself, I focus on myself and that just feeds my pride. Besides, it hardly ever results in success either in dealing with my business or my spiritual life. So it's "Father, help me! I can't do this on my own!"
And with that (and it's taken me years and years of trying to even get to the point of trusting God in this way) I place the eventual success or failure of any particular endeavor in His Hands and just get on with my prayer life and my work life best I can this day. When I do that, I realize I can both build my business and become a saint.
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