One of the devil’s cruelest tricks is to convince us that our lives are a meaningless grind and that we don’t matter.
Don’t believe him. Lay people are on the front lines of God’s project of re-Edenizing the world. We are returning mankind, starting with ourselves and our families, to our first relationship with God — he returns us to innocence in the sacrament of confession, then goes about establishing his will “on earth as it is in heaven” through the sacrament of marriage.
In the course of a day, each daily duty of our state in life echoes in eternity.
When I get up in the morning, I rise to serve my wife and children as God’s chosen envoy.
As a married man, my highest priority in the morning is my wife, seeing to what she needs, and my children, keeping them on track.
Each menial task takes on a supernatural significance because of the sacrament of matrimony. As married couples fulfill their family obligations, they “are penetrated with the spirit of Christ, which suffuses their whole lives,” said the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes.
By serving my family I am literally living the life of Christ himself, with Abba Father looking on, well pleased. In fact, what I do is so important that God sends a magnificent, powerful supernatural creature — my own personal guardian angel — to help me.
My day is sacred even if I can’t make it to daily Mass. But if I can, it gets even greater.
On every day of the week except Sunday, because of my lay state in life, the tasks of my household are a higher priority than Mass.
But if I have the chance to go to a daily Mass, the day takes on an added significance.
Our churches are majestic and richly decorated because they are royal palaces for the King of heaven and earth to receive his royal sons and daughters, to prepare them and send them out to do his will. In heaven, God is surrounded by “thousands of archangels and tens of thousands of angels … the Cherubim and Seraphim, six winged, many-eyed, soaring aloft with their wings,” as the Divine Liturgy puts it.
But he elevates my parish’s humble daily Mass to the same level of that supernatural choir of praise.
My work (at home, school, or a workplace) isn’t just the daily grind — it’s my participation in the salvation of the world.
Work feels frustrating as often as it feels freeing. It is, by turns, too stressful and too boring. Sometimes my work seems meaningless; sometimes it seems monstrously unfair.
But it is the chosen way God has selected for me to complete my portion in his grand plan to change the world. As a lay person, it is my special vocation to help him “illuminate and order all temporal things … to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer.”
Laypeople can all do this, regardless of their work, by being “witnesses to Christ in all circumstances and at the very heart of the community of mankind.” It is their job to “uproot the rule of sin within themselves and in the world.”
If we do our best, with love, God’s grace will use our efforts to accomplish more than we see, and more than we can imagine.
At the end of the day, I return home to crosses — and Christ.
Sometimes coming home is like re-entering an oasis of domestic peace after the struggles of the day. But often, it is more like entering the battleground of family life after the calm of work.
In either case, despite appearances, home life isn’t defined by a couple’s failure, pettiness, and selfishness. It is the crucible where the presence of Jesus Christ himself in the sacrament of marriage purifies a couple, making them humble and forgiving. As the Catechism beautifully puts it:
“Christ dwells with them, gives them the strength to take up their crosses and so follow him, to rise again after they have fallen, to forgive one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to ‘be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,’ and to love one another with supernatural, tender, and fruitful love.”
So don’t ever think your life isn’t meaningful, even if you are barely keeping up with your state in life.
St. Thérèse was right to call it a “Little Way” — but you could also make the case that there is nothing little about it.
We are each made in the image and likeness of God and given the grace to be with him for eternity. We will outlive the stars — and the deeds we do in love each day are more powerful than earthquakes, hurricanes, and forest fires, because they put our stamp on the Kingdom of God, forever.
