Doing God's Will for the Wrong Reasons

It may seem a somewhat irreverent place in which to pray, but I have more genuine prayers and conversations with God in my car when I’m driving to and from work. I drive through a vast expanse of farmland, forest, and countryside during this time which provides for peaceful, thoughtful moments. One morning as I was driving, I was also reflecting on my life. My employer’s fiscal year was coming to a close, and so I was considering all the projects I had accomplished on top of balancing my home, social, and personal life. I said to myself, “Good job. Lord, help me to continue doing Your will.” It was a line that I would often say during my prayers, and I did not think much of it except to express my desire to do God’s will. Eventually I realized, however, that this prayer was not genuine. Instead, I had been mentally patting myself on the back, bolstering my ego for all the good I thought I had done. Vainglory had seeped into my life. I had ceased to recognize God’s true will, the gratitude that He deserved, and all that had happened in my life because of His joyful plans.

It would take an act of God, of course, for me to see how deeply my selfishness had settled into my veins. At 6:00 AM on a Sunday, I awoke to early to be better able to seize the day with my family. We were planning to spend some quality time together after a long work week. The night before I had been feeling motivated and excited for the day ahead, but what the morning brought instead was a sluggish, moody household. I was feeling particularly tired, and prone to focusing on the bad, rather than the good, that day. I therefore very willingly complained about having to wake up early and take a whole hour out of my day to (I was crankily convinced) get nothing in return out of our planned activities, let alone Sunday Mass. We eventually made it into our usual pew, I sang when I was supposed to sing, recited prayers aloud with the rest of my fellow parishioners, and generally looked like I was doing everything properly. I called this “doing God’s will” too. Yet just like during my car ride prayers, I was not truly present. I was not loving the Lord my God with all of my heart, all of my soul, and all of my mind.

When it came time for The Consecration, just when I thought I had finally quieted my internal grumblings, I gazed up as the priest raised the Eucharist and a small part of me remarked, “Lord, am I really doing your will by being here today?” In that moment my conscience (and probably my Guardian Angel too) laughed at me. A sense of shame overwhelmed me. I had complained about sacrificing one hour of my life, a good life that had been graciously given to me through the actions of a man who had also had a good life, yet who had given it up, partly for me. My lack of gratitude, selflessness, and trust in the Lord astounded me in that moment. As I knelt before the True Presence, I saw myself for what I was, and I knew that I could and should do so much better.

How presumptuous I had been using the word “continue” in my prayers. It assumed that my choices were always correct, that I could never fail to see the true will of God. Moreover, this simple word did not acknowledge God’s true love, power, and desire for me to surrender my trust fully to Him. I had only been trusting in myself, assuming that things would always be the same through my own carefully laid plans that I thought would enable me to succeed. I was becoming a slave to a selfish desire, looking at God as a means to an end, rather than the means AND the end.

God wants us to succeed, not to bring ourselves glory, but to bring Him greater glory. In doing so, we are better able to spread His way and bring His love to all of His children. Moments of epiphany like this are just some of the many wonderful miracles brought to us by the outward sign of God’s love: the sacraments. It took the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar to help me realize God’s true will.

The next day, I settled into the front seat of my car to drive into work. As I rounded the curves of the road and passed over the hills filled with horse pastures, I again reflected on my life, including all the goodness of the past, the struggles that had helped to bring me closer to God, and the hopes of the future still to come. “Lord, thank you for all that you have done for me,” I said, “and help me to truly see and do Your true will each and every day.”