Make Yourself Useful
I've been paying more attention to what i actually do with my time, because "I like doing this" doesn't seem like a particularly good reason to give something hours of my life. There are things i enjoy and there is nothing automatically wrong with enjoying them, but enjoyment is very easy to turn into a purpose without noticing, then suddenly most of a person's free time is organized around food, entertainment, social media, hobbies, comfort, buying things, talking about things and finding new things to want. You can spend years that way and still be busy every day. Being around the group has made that much more obvious to me, There is usually something useful happening, somebody needs help, somebody has a question about the faith, somebody needs prayer, there is work to do, Mass to attend, something to read or learn, and people are generally willing to give their time to it. I've started noticing how much easier life becomes when every decision doesn't have to begin with asking what i would prefer. Sometimes what i prefer is irrelevant because there is already something better to do.
I don't want to spend my life becoming an expert in keeping myself satisfied, i know what food i like, what i enjoy drawing, what makes me comfortable, which people are easiest to talk to and what i'd probably choose to do with an empty afternoon, but none of those things deserve very much authority, they can have their proper place without becoming the structure of an entire life. There are people who seem to spend nearly every free hour trying to make themselves happier, then complain that Faith asks too much the moment God interferes with something they enjoy.
We have been given an unbelievable amount of time that could be spent on God and somehow we keep acting as though He is asking for the leftovers. We can pray together, read Scripture, learn enough about the faith that we can actually explain it when somebody asks, teach people who know less than we do, encourage somebody to return to Mass, speak about God without becoming embarrassed, visit people, help people, do work that needs doing and pray for people who will never know we prayed for them. Even ordinary work can be offered to God, so there really isn't much reason for entire days to belong exclusively to ourselves.
i think people underestimate how much influence they can have on another person's faith because they imagine it has to be something enormous. Somebody asks why you believe something and you actually know how to answer, somebody who hasn't prayed in years hears you speak about prayer as though it matters, somebody sees that you go to Mass even when it is inconvenient, somebody is ashamed to return to confession and you tell them to go anyway. Those things matter. If another person becomes even slightly more serious about God because you were willing to speak, then that hour accomplished more than another hour spent making yourself comfortable.
I've had people tell me that something i said or did helped them become closer to God, and that is still strange to hear, but i'm extremely grateful for it, there are plenty of things about myself that i struggle to like and plenty that still needs work, so knowing that God can still make something useful out of what i have is one of the things i'm most thankful for. If somebody prayed again, returned to the faith or became even slightly closer to Him because i happened to be there, then i'm glad i was there, and i hope He gives me many more opportunities to be useful in that way. It makes me want to become easier to use rather than congratulating myself for the few times something good has happened through me.
there is still far too much selfishness in the way i spend my time, too many things i do simply because i feel like doing them and too much resistance when something interrupts whatever plan i had for myself. I can waste three hours without thinking about it and then suddenly become very protective of twenty minutes when those twenty minutes are needed by somebody else.
I think all of us should be much more serious about this. We aren't here merely to avoid committing particularly terrible sins while otherwise doing whatever keeps us entertained until we die. We are supposed to love God, become holy, love our neighbour, teach what Christ taught us and actually bring the faith into the lives we're living. If we know the Gospel, then we have something worth giving to other people, and if we believe eternal life is real then treating that as less important than whether somebody finds us irritating makes very little sense.
There should be more conversations about God, more prayer, more Scripture being read instead of sitting untouched, more people actually learning what the Church teaches instead of repeating whatever they vaguely remember, more willingness to answer questions and more concern for whether the people we love are becoming closer to God. There should be less embarrassment about being openly Christian and much less concern with making faith unobtrusive enough that nobody around us ever has to think about it.
None of that requires everybody to abandon ordinary life. People have work, families, responsibilities, illness, rest they genuinely need and different things they're called to do, but "ordinary life" cannot become another name for a life in which God receives an hour on Sunday and everything else belongs to us. If He is actually God, He cannot reasonably be one interest among twenty others.
Maybe that's what usefulness means more than being necessary. God doesn't need any of us, but we have still been given time, abilities, relationships and opportunities that can be used for Him. Everybody has something, the question is how much of it we're keeping for ourselves.
Deo Gratias.