How Do I Maintain a Christ-Centered Life While Having a Career?
We all know that we must maintain a job to live a stable life. However, careers can consumer all our energy, overtake our focus on Christ, and enter us into the risky sin of idolatry. Too many of us have made God only one of our many priorities: “There’s my career, marriage, kids, and there’s God.” But we should never tolerate adding God as an item on a list! He must be our first and only priority. Ultimately, we are supposed to live for God and serve Him, while serving others. This focus is what we should keep at the forefront of our minds, with personal goals and ambitions secondary.
So, how do we maintain this focus while also putting in effort to make a living? Through detachment. If you want to find peace between God and money, first, know that everything that we earn or receive is a gift from God (1 Chronicles 29:14). This is detachment. If we truly understand that the money we are earning and the earthly belongings that we have are only made possible because of the generosity of the Lord, then we are less likely to become attached to it. Therefore, our gift back to Him regarding wealth is first our tithe. Just like Abel, it must be our first fruits, the first check we write. He gives gifts to us to be good stewards of them.
Whenever you need help finding focus, use the acronym: J-O-Y, Jesus-Others-Yourself. This is a perfect guideline for how to distribute our wealth. We first give to Christ’s Church, then the others through charity, then finally we receive what is left of the lot.
Another great exercise is to take time to prayerfully reflect on this question: “Do I think, stress, and analyze over my career more than I spend time in prayer or stewardship?” For most of us, the answer will be yes. By recognizing this unfortunate truth, we must all take time to redirect our focus. As the saying goes “Do you pray about it as much as you talk about it?” Pray about your career, asking God to bless it. If you are working with God’s blessing your focus will redirect.
“Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord and not for people, knowing that it is from the Lord that you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve..” Colossians 3:23-24
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
2426 Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power; it is ordered first of all to the service of persons, of the whole man, and of the entire human community.
“The worship of the Golden Calf of old has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose” — Pope Francis