Living the Daily Life
The surrendered life is one of peace. When one has surrendered to God’s will, there is an integrity, a purity, a directness and simplicity about one’s actions. Instead of trailing myriads of one’s own intentions, the eye of the spirit is single.
This sounds easy and indeed it is. But like most actions that are simple when one has learned them, they take an immense amount of practice to learn. The difficulty is not in doing God’s will. That is the easy part because God always makes his will clear when we are prepared to listen to it, and he also always gives us the grace to do what he asks of us.
No, the difficulty lies in getting our own will out of the way. Every moment of every day we are assailed with thoughts and impulses which rush into our minds. These thoughts and impulses usually come in one of two guises. One is fear and the other is pleasure. We think of something that we are afraid of or worried about, and our immediate reaction is to forget what God is willing us to do at that moment and go off and do our own thing. Or we think of something we would like to do, and exactly the same thing happens.
Neither the actions resulting from fear nor from pleasure are necessarily sins. In fact they may on the face of it be spiritual or holy things. The point is not that they are bad in themselves, but that they take us away from the “one thing necessary” - the doing of God’s will at precisely this point in time.
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42).
There was nothing wrong about the work that Martha was doing in itself and indeed it would have been the right thing to do in its place. It’s just that at that particular moment the right thing to be doing was to be listening to what Jesus was saying. And notice that, not only was Martha missing out on the blessing of that moment, she was also resenting that her sister wasn’t missing it!
Si Fractus Fortis
in Daily Life, God's Will, Surrender
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