Working With Love and Abandoning Ourselves to God's Will in the Present Moment

Last time we looked at how to bring love to our work. Now we combine that with abandoning ourselves to God's Will at work in the Present Moment.

First let's assume we put love into our work. Let's say we succeed. Even our most trivial scraps are somehow filled with our love, driven by our love God. We do all for Him, nor matter how insignificant, even boring a task might be. 

Great. But what happens when all that love that we put into everything we do results in a less than satisfactory result? Love, as we all have likely experienced, doesn't preclude pain. It won't guarantee that the person or object that receives our love will reciprocate.

At work, we may put our love into the most menial task. Will it return our love? Well, when I complete my menial tasks, they just sort of sit there. Like a bump on a log. No smiles, no high-fives...nothing. Just done.

Worse than the bump on a log are the times when I lovingly put my mind and body into feeding some especially challenging task or project and it bites task the hand that feeds it. Putting out my best efforts, doing so with love, and receiving little or no recognition can be hard to take.

Okay, so maybe I didn't expect much return. But what about when you put your love into how you treat a colleague, a customer, your boss? And in return, you get...nothing. No recognition; worse, hostility. You've seen that more than once, right?

The thing is, the love you put in doesn't just disappear. It's still "there." It may not feel like it is. But it is. And here's where combining bringing love to work with abandoning ourselves to God's Will rides to the rescue. God receives that love. He takes it into and holds it in His loving Hands. And there it will remain, one of the meritorious efforts that will, we hope, make our Particular Judgment an ultimately happy encounter.

But let's let the "masters" of the teaching of abandonment to God's Will take over here. 

As Fr. De Caussade writes: 

“We are bored with the small happenings around us, yet it is these trivialities – as we consider them – which would do marvels for us if only we did not despise them.”

 “God speaks to every individual through what happens to them moment by moment.” And elsewhere, “The events of each moment are stamped with the will of God … we find all that is necessary in the present moment.” 

“If we have abandoned ourselves to God, there is only one rule for us: the duty of the present moment.”

Note the added element: The Present Moment. Called by some the "Sacrament" of the Present Moment, it has been taught by Fr. De Caussade and other serious Catholic spiritual writers as an essential piece of our spiritual exercises. It's what keeps our Interior Life constantly and consistently awake. The past is over. The future is unknown. All we really have at our disposal is right now, the present moment. We've written extensively about this in the past. And now we combine it with abandonment to God's Will.

As Abbot Chapman says:

“The only thing that matters is now” 

“I mean that we have to be exactly in God’s will – united actively and passively with what He has arranged for us to be and to do, so that at every moment we are quite simply in touch with God, because we are to wish to do what He wants of us, and to be as we find He wishes us to be. There is no other perfection than this. Tomorrow and yesterday are quite of secondary importance.”

To sum up: Put love into all we do - at work - and at every other time. Abandon ourselves to God's Will each moment of our lives by living in the present moment alone.

In the end, these are simply instructions that any of us, saint and sinner, can follow. They may not be easy to sustain at first. But with practice - likely years of practice - they will more and more become our natural way to approaching our work and all else that we do.

All becomes all for God. If we can do this now, we can touch Heaven here on earth.

Let's try and approach every task today, now at work this way: abandoning ourselves to God's Will at work in the Present Moment. If God grants us a tomorrow, simply rinse and repeat.