When we put our hand to the plow, what will spring up?

"Pray as though everything depended on God, and act as if everything depended on you." - St. Augustine

Since writing on Wednesday about working hard and zealously for God, I have been thinking about quite the opposite. Well, what I've been thinking about is not exactly the opposite, but rather the compliment, the harmony to hard work. In particular, I have been thinking about how for every ounce of hard work we put into the Christian life, at the exact same time we should put in an ounce of trust and abandonment to the will of God.

I've noticed that so many things in being a disciple of Christ involve seemingly incompatible paradoxes like this. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." "The greatest among you shall be your servant." "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it." Over and over again, we find that as Christians we must embrace two incredible extremes. We must have magnanimity and desire the glory of heaven, but we must also have humility and despise the glory of this earth. We are called to love our enemy, even though he may truly remain our enemy. We are asked to give up our very lives out of love for a greater life.

As Christians, then, we are called to be extreme in every way, and after writing on Wednesday about the need for hard work, I began to think about how there is also need for extreme abandonment. Like the other paradoxes, this seems impossible to us. It seems that either you work really hard, in which you take things into your own hands, or you don't do anything, and you wait for God to make up His mind about you. How can we apply ourselves and abandon ourselves at the same time?

And yet, there does seem to be a way to do exactly this, but it involves a personal poverty that many of us are simply not willing to embrace. The key to the problem, I believe, is the distinction between the work we do, and the results we see. So often, when we go to apply ourselves in the field of work we do so already attached to the results we will see. We think to ourselves "If I do this, then this WILL happen." It's natural for us to go to work with an end in mind, aiming towards a goal. If we didn't have this goal, we wouldn't work. The true poverty of abandonment, though, is that we recognize when we go to work, God will bring about the end that He desires. We are not the ultimate determining factor of the results of our work; God is.

Indeed, we find that often we put our hand to the plough and we reap exactly the fruits we were looking for. However, just as often, we put our hand to the plough and we find that the result is far from what we had expected or hoped for. We can put in great amounts of effort, pain, and sweat and in the end we are left with a result wholly unlooked for and wholly unwanted. What happens is not what we intended to happen, and we ask ourselves, "Why didn't this work? Why did I not get what I worked for, what I wanted?" We can become bitter, as if God did not answer our prayers. Indeed, from our own point of view it often seems that He has not answered our prayers.

And yet, if we had trust in God and truly united our wills to Him, the experience of disappointed work would be so different. We would find that during the work, we would focus more on the work and less on the end. We would find ourselves doing a better job without the pressure of having to bring everything about on our own. When disappointments came, we would have more peace and less turmoil in our souls because we would know that the true result of our work is not this or that earthly fruit, but rather it is closeness and union with God. We would find that, even if the fruit of our work ends up being disappointing and perhaps even painful for us, the work itself still has value in making us more in love with God.

The value of our work, of our hard effort, then, is not the results we see here on earth, but the results we will see in heaven. The true value of work is that it brings us closer to the greatest worker of all, the Creator and Redeemer. This aspect of work can only be seen, though, if we let go of the earthly fruit. We have to be poor; we cannot attach ourselves to our goals. We must be willing to work hard and allow God to bring us the fruit we need. To be a true Christian, then, a true follower of Christ, we must possess both extremes. We have to work as though everything depended on us, and pray as though everything depended on God.