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APRIL 13
PROCRASTINATION
“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now
if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells
within me… Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body
of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7: 19-20,
24-25)
Here St. Paul expresses the kind of exasperation I feel about my
procrastination; when I put off the things I should be doing, and instead
do things I should not be doing. But St. Paul does not just exasperatedly
talk about “the problem”; he moves on to identify “the solution,”
exclaiming, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” In other
words, he gratefully recognizes “the solution” is not in himself, but in the
Power and Wisdom of God, Jesus Christ.
In practical terms, this means I need His help, and that His help is there
for me. When I examine the reasons for my procrastination, at the top of
the list are: 1. Self-Reliance (leaving God’s help out of the picture), which
leads to 2. Fear (of failure or success), 3. Perfectionism (i.e., waiting for
more perfect conditions or a more perfect time for tackling the task at
hand), 4. Laziness (wanting the outcome without the effort), or even 5.
Resentment (like a passive resistance to an authority that gave me the
task in the first place). All these spiritual “diseases” can be identified and
healed, little by little, through God’s grace, if I humbly accept His help and
shed the light of His word on my procrastination.
Today let me open up to God’s help, co-operating with Him as I
face my immediate responsibilities, one by one. They are never the
insurmountable mountains they seemed to be, when I approach them
with a bit of faith. “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard
seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will
move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” (Mt 17: 20)
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