Editorial: Setting Priorities

Setting Priorities

W hat is your top priority in life?

We prioritize our agenda, we send documents by priority mail, we stamp in large, red letters PRIORITY on those things we want shipped first. But the most valuable item of all – our own life so often is a jumble, if not a jungle of priorities.

What’s top priority in your life? So many persons and things fight for this first place: the children, our health, retirement, the job, the need for cash, not to speak of our reputation and good name. The list is end-less. And just as the Successful Business Seminar tells us that prioritizing goals is the key to success, so too our life itself must have a clear fundamental goal.

Discover Real Priorities In Our Life

Once we discover the real priorities in our life and most especially the overall top priority, we have to test it to see if it really deserves to be in first place. Business Seminars often illustrate the correct listing of agenda by recounting success stories: “This is how Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller reached financial dominance.” And even more striking, the study-day usually tells the tale of he a Mrs. Mary Jones turned an almost defunct local dry cleaning business into a national franchise. And the bottom line is the same for all the heroes or heroines: they set correct priorities and stuck to them. The costly five hour seminar ends with a “You too can be a Mrs. Jones . Go thou and do likewise”!  And so we imitate the stars of capitalism in the hopes that by setting our agenda as they did, we too will become success stories.

Yet the only real success story deals with achieving the one goal of  life itself, the purpose f0r which we were created: living in total harmony with God in this life and thereby sharing eternal joy with him in the next Any other final end demeans the human person. Any other ultimate goal leads to a fleeting, transient joy followed by an incredible let-down.  Any other overall purpose in life can never fulfill the cravings of the human heart. Only GOD ALONE, as Saint Louis de Montfort teaches, can be the answer to our quest for endless happiness.

Vocation of Holiness

Father de Montfort writes: “Chosen soul, living image of God and redeemed by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, God wants you to become holy like him in this life and glorious like him in the next. It is certain that growth in the holiness of God is your vocation. All your thoughts, words, actions, everything you suffer or undertake must lead you towards that goal”.  (Secret of Mary, 3).

A nd so we celebrate, this month, Christianity’s big success story: Our Lady of the Assumption. She is the model of all creation for she gloriously achieved the only valid goal of life itself; one with Jesus Christ in the eternal glow of God the Father.

Mary’s Assumption into heaven is the success story that we must imitate. What was top priority for her? Nothing more or less than an active and responsible surrender to God’s will: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done unto me according to your word”. (Luke 1:38). GOD ALONE is the goal of her life.

Everything she planned, everything she did, everything she measured was in the light of God. She held on to God as top priority, even when the course of her life led to watching her Son on his way to execution and standing faithfully beside Him on Golgotha’s hill. Mary did not understand the mysterious ways of God. She did not see the beautiful weaving God was creating with such painful threads. She saw how clearly – the meaning-less and entangled underside of the tapestry of her life. But she never put an idol in the place of God’s will. Her life was centered on God who became enfleshed in Jesus the Lord.

Formalize Life’s Top Priority

Don’t let the Feast of the Assumption pass without taking stock of your life. Conduct a private *life-priority seminar”.  To that you will be able to identify your present top priority  and then check it out with the agenda of Our Lady. First on her list was God’s incarnate wisdom, Jesus.  And so intensely was it first that she saw everything, judged everything, measured everything,  qualified everything in the light of Jesus.

And so with us. Worries, over-concern, over-anxiety, good looks or good name, all must topple as ultimate goal. Only Jesus can be center-stage. Then we are sure that one day, we like Mary, will be taken up into eternal glory.

Saint Louis de Montfort responds to our quest for top priority when he writes. “To Jews Christ the Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom is to know enough;  to know everything else but not to know Jesus is ta know nothing”.