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What The Hell As Long As We Get To Heaven!!!

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JMJ


What the Hell as long as we get to Heaven!!!

These words were spoken by a seasoned Traditional Catholic who has passed on to his reward. 

There's a lot of wisdom in these words. 

Our goals are stated in the Catechism quite clearly:
 
Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.
In an earlier article I wrote an article on how to apply strategic planning to leading a Catholic Life.  I used a simply hierarchical diagram to try to explain the concept:
 

 
 
... here's what I wrote in October 2022:

Simply put, the Vision (desired future state) for all Catholics is to "Be Happy with God in the Next Life".  Our Mission (purpose) is to save our souls and to achieve that, we need to accomplish the goals of knowing, loving and serving God in this life.

Whatever means (objectives) we take to achieve the goals, they all converge on the mission and vision.  The critical success factor is alignment from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy. In other words, any misalignment introduces a risk of failure to achieve the goals and ultimately the vision.

So a key point is to reflect on our lives and look for any strategic misalignment between this strategy and your personal, spiritual,family and work life.  The misalignment may be something that you do or something that you don't do. 

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So - if you look carefully, this is all about what we have to do - anything else is, as we say in business, is out of scope. In other words, it  is just us trying to add cubits to our height (Matthew 6:27). 

What the Pope is doing is awful, same thing with the various world leaders, the coup leaders in the Sudan, China, etc, etc, etc. While these things are sad and could impact you, but unless you are directly affected by these events, they are secondary to what you need to do today.

What are your objectives?  What are you doing to increase your knowledge, love and service of God?  Skipping the first two and going straight to the service is, intuitively to me, dangerous because you won't have the foundation to support the work of service to God.

The goals of a Catholic's life are just three and if we fulfill these three regularly and continually through life, we will fulfill our mission and hopefully be admitted to the Beatific Vision. 

If we don't, we won't.


 
 
So the objectives are what we do to accomplish the goals, are their goals are achieved we are fulfilling our mission.  Now, unlike the one-and-done of a strategic plan, these goals are perpetual because:
  1. We are human, inconstant and constantly changing. We acheive and dis-achieve (is that  a word)
  2. God is infinite, so we can never completely accomplish the goals. There is always another level to unlock.

However, the objectives are things that you can complete. I could and have read the Catechism of Trent.  That is a finite objective and these we can complete.  In some cases there are books that we have an objective to read and learn from each day.

The list of objectives should grow and in some cases be revisited.

Returning to the original words with which I opened this article, the words are true.  Anything that doesn't relate to and support our mission in some way is probably out of scope in some way.

So - we know what we have to do and why we need to do them.  Now we just have to put that into practice.  

Easier said than done.

P^3

 
 
 
 
 







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