Advent at Work: Keep Your MInd on What's Important
Keeping your mind on what's important is always a challenge for me at work. And the challenge extends from both work at big companies to running a small business. I bring this up today because there's a lesson here for all of us that's related to the holy season of Advent.
When I worked for some big companies, the challenge lay in keeping my time and energy focused on the job for which I was hired despite the many distractions faced in big companies: lots of colleagues who requested of demanded your time; many and mostly meaningless meetings; office politics that - despite my best efforts - frequently sucked my attention into its vortex of intrigue. Then there were the personal interactions that took up my time: when they were positive, they caused me to spend too much time talking to pleasant colleagues; when they were negative, they caused me to spend too much time either watching my back, or reacting to actions initiated by people who were either incompetent, or motivated by their greed or lust for power. (If you think this is an exaggeration, you've either never worked for a big company, or the big company you've worked for is one of a few exceptions to the general laws of corporate nature (similar in a certain way to human nature), or you are/were just oblivious to the obvious.)
When I ran a small business, the challenge lay in keeping my attention focused on what was important despite the myriad of urgent tasks that attacked (actually attack, since I'm now running a small business today) me each day. When you don't have an extensive staff handling various aspects of the business (and my small business experience has not included extensive staff support), you're it, meaning the buck stops HERE, meaning there's no one else to deal with the crisis of the moment that is part and parcel of any business.
So, in a nutshell, work can easily and frequently cause the best of us to take our eye off the ball, to get dragged into the inessential, to perhaps neglect or at least delay dealing with what's really important each day. Such is the reality of our work lives.
With that in mind, we look now at Advent, this season that Holy Mother Church provides to help us prepare for the coming of Christ.
Remember first that this season is not a mere "prelude" to Christmas. We ought to be preparing our souls to welcome Our Lord into this world. And our welcome is not some "nostalgic" look-back to a day 2000 or so years ago when the Divine Infant of Bethlehem was physically born of the Virgin Mary in a cave in Bethlehem in the presence of St. Joseph. Our preparation focuses also on the very real, awesome and fearsome fact that Our Lord will come again at the end of the world, that is at the Last Judgment. So our preparations are about as far from nostalgia as one can imagine. We're not reliving our childhoods by trying to recreate the wide-eyed excitement we all (or most of us) felt at the coming of Christmas. We are in a season of deep spiritual significance that none of us can afford to ignore (heaven forbid) or even in the tiniest way let slip by without our attending to it with our complete and rapt attention.
OK, so maybe the busy days of practical preparation for the Christmas Season combined with the demands of work have in fact taken up the majority of our time and energy so far during Advent. I suspect Our Lord understands this. But don't for a moment cease in your own effort to redirect your time and energy to your spiritual preparation each and every moment that you realize you're not doing your utmost to prepare.
And if you haven't always been faithful (as I have not) in your preparation, remember:
When I worked for some big companies, the challenge lay in keeping my time and energy focused on the job for which I was hired despite the many distractions faced in big companies: lots of colleagues who requested of demanded your time; many and mostly meaningless meetings; office politics that - despite my best efforts - frequently sucked my attention into its vortex of intrigue. Then there were the personal interactions that took up my time: when they were positive, they caused me to spend too much time talking to pleasant colleagues; when they were negative, they caused me to spend too much time either watching my back, or reacting to actions initiated by people who were either incompetent, or motivated by their greed or lust for power. (If you think this is an exaggeration, you've either never worked for a big company, or the big company you've worked for is one of a few exceptions to the general laws of corporate nature (similar in a certain way to human nature), or you are/were just oblivious to the obvious.)
When I ran a small business, the challenge lay in keeping my attention focused on what was important despite the myriad of urgent tasks that attacked (actually attack, since I'm now running a small business today) me each day. When you don't have an extensive staff handling various aspects of the business (and my small business experience has not included extensive staff support), you're it, meaning the buck stops HERE, meaning there's no one else to deal with the crisis of the moment that is part and parcel of any business.
So, in a nutshell, work can easily and frequently cause the best of us to take our eye off the ball, to get dragged into the inessential, to perhaps neglect or at least delay dealing with what's really important each day. Such is the reality of our work lives.
With that in mind, we look now at Advent, this season that Holy Mother Church provides to help us prepare for the coming of Christ.
Remember first that this season is not a mere "prelude" to Christmas. We ought to be preparing our souls to welcome Our Lord into this world. And our welcome is not some "nostalgic" look-back to a day 2000 or so years ago when the Divine Infant of Bethlehem was physically born of the Virgin Mary in a cave in Bethlehem in the presence of St. Joseph. Our preparation focuses also on the very real, awesome and fearsome fact that Our Lord will come again at the end of the world, that is at the Last Judgment. So our preparations are about as far from nostalgia as one can imagine. We're not reliving our childhoods by trying to recreate the wide-eyed excitement we all (or most of us) felt at the coming of Christmas. We are in a season of deep spiritual significance that none of us can afford to ignore (heaven forbid) or even in the tiniest way let slip by without our attending to it with our complete and rapt attention.
OK, so maybe the busy days of practical preparation for the Christmas Season combined with the demands of work have in fact taken up the majority of our time and energy so far during Advent. I suspect Our Lord understands this. But don't for a moment cease in your own effort to redirect your time and energy to your spiritual preparation each and every moment that you realize you're not doing your utmost to prepare.
And if you haven't always been faithful (as I have not) in your preparation, remember:
THERE'S STILL TIME!
Divine Infant of Bethlehem
come and take birth in our hearts
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