Need for daily strategizing

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

 

OUR life in this world will always be in some state of war. That’s because there will always be things to conquer and things to defend for as long as we live. That’s how things are. And we should just be ready to deal with this kind of life-long condition.

That is why we have to realize that we need to make daily strategies, ever keeping and sharpening our focus as well as making ourselves strong and as much as possible invincible to all those things that can take us off-track.

We just cannot be complacent and cavalier about this condition. Yes, we should be willing to complicate our life, since complications will always be unavoidable even if we are not serious about our life’s real goals.

The first thing to consider is the clarity of the objectives we should be after. In this, there are different and varying levels. But we should know exactly what our ultimate goal to reach is, irrespective of the changing conditions and circumstances. This ultimate goal should be the one to give the proper ranking and direction of the different secondary goals we have.

In this regard, we should have no doubt that our ultimate goal is to be what God wants us to be, that is, for us to be his image and likeness, his adopted children, meant to share in his very life for all eternity. The other name for this goal is the quest for sanctity. Thus, we need to understand that everything in our life is meant to train and test us whether we want to be what God wants us to be.

To come up with the appropriate strategy to deal with this condition of our life, we should have, first of all, some structure or system that can guide us irrespective of the changing circumstances of our daily life. This structure or system should be made up of some practices of piety that would keep our spiritual and supernatural bearing intact as we cruise the seas and oceans of our life.

These practices of piety should be the basic ones like a time for prayer, recourse to the sacraments especially the holy eucharist and confession, some devotions like the praying of the holy rosary, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and other practices like regular examinations of conscience, presence of God all throughout the day making use of human devices, etc.,

Everyday, we have to tweak this system to adapt it to the peculiar conditions of the day. In this regard, it is also good to consider our concrete physical, emotional and mental conditions, so we would somehow know what to do when their strong and weak points would impact on the different events of the day. Not all days are the same. There are what we call ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days.

Definitely, we have to plan things well, monitoring the different developments of the day and assessing our reactions to them from time to time. We should see how things are meeting the goals, especially the ultimate one, that we have set for the day.

This, definitely, will require a certain discipline from us. At the beginning, we might feel ourselves awkward and having some difficulties. But if we persevere, time will come when the skill and art of daily strategizing would come to us like an instinct!

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com