Can We Reconcile the Little Way With Big-picture Career Planning?
“Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them” (St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “The Story of a Soul”).
Professionals face tremendous pressure to craft and follow a long-term plan. “What’s your five-year plan?” is a ubiquitous interview question. Entrepreneurs, too, tend to be flooded with content about planning tools, from elaborate vision boards to 50-page business plans. It can seem like everyone is focused on the future and that those who aren’t are, as the adage goes, “planning to fail.”
While it is certainly prudent to create a game plan for your career or business, this long-term obsession can create angst and generate questions about whether we are on the “right” path, whether we are growing in the “right” direction, or whether we are following the Lord’s plan for us. This dissonance between long-term planning and short-term focus on our daily work can disrupt our focus and destroy our peace.
Church history is replete with examples of individuals whose greatness stemmed not from strategic planning but from daily faithfulness. In particular, we can look to St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Little Way, a spiritual posture of obedient focus on performing seemingly insignificant tasks with love.
Father Richard Rohr describes the Little Way as a “spirituality of imperfection” that stands “in contrast to the ‘big way’ of heroic perfectionism.” As Fr. Rohr explains, St. Thérèse “teaches, in essence, that as a little one ‘with all her imperfections,’ God’s love is drawn toward her.” In other words, it is not our savvy but our smallness that impels us to rely more fully on God.
Though St. Thérèse has become the model of obedience in the micro-moments, slightly less known is her mother, St. Zélie Martin, an entrepreneur and mother of nine (four of whom died before age five). Though thick with tragedy, Zélie’s life is exalted as a model of vocational faithfulness. She owned a successful lace company, which often required harsh trade-offs, like less time with her children than she would’ve preferred. Yet, she discerned a call to business—and though, as she often remarked in her letters, she would have preferred to scale down her work outside the home, she responded faithfully to that call.
Zélie lacked the time, privilege, or leisure to bellyache about her five-year plan, vision board, or what her highest and best contribution might be. Her mission was the work in front of her, toilsome as it often was (she writes in her letters of long, late nights and brutally early mornings filling orders while caring for sick children or grieving the ones who died).
Yet, not only did the Martin family thrive financially—which, in turn, allowed them to pour into their community—but they also became a family of saints. Three of them (Thérèse, Zélie, and Zélie’s husband Louis) are canonized, and some speculate that others are soon to follow (Thérèse’s sister Léonie is a Servant of God). To become a saint alongside your spouse while raising several others? It seems there isn’t much else a Catholic mother (and businesswoman) could want.
The Martin family reminds us that we do not become saints by executing a perfect long-term plan or setting aspirational goals. Rather, by assuming the posture of a dependent child, we draw the love of God toward ourselves, as Fr. Rohr says.
Yet we cannot deny the reality of doing business in our modern world: We do need a plan, especially if we lack a boss who literally tells us what to do each day. How, then, do we proceed with prudent planning while relying, childlike, on Christ?
Planning and Persistence: A Push-and-pull
St. Thérèse and St. Zélie exemplify how living within our limitations can be our path to sanctification. St. Thérèse’s was a vocation to quiet prayer and contemplation. Pressed by the unique demands of her vocation and her physical frailty, she was primed to rely entirely on Christ’s sustaining presence. Similarly, the intense suffering St. Zélie’s vocation thrust upon her hollowed her into an empty vessel, ready to be filled to the brim with grace.
In my career, I struggle with anxiety over whether I am on the “right track” or if I’m living up to my greatest potential. In doing so, I frequently find myself complaining about my limitations: I’m so tired. I need more child care. My kids are always getting sick. This negative feedback loop distracts me from doing the daily work my vocation demands and, instead, tempts me to fantasize about an alternative (usually easier!) reality.
Invariably, the seasons that force me to confront my limitations in time, talent, and energy are the most fruitful. When I lose myself in focusing on the particular season’s demands, I also lose the harmful tendency to hand-wring and catastrophize about my future. Then, when the fog clears, I look up and realize that I do, in fact, have some clarity about where to turn next.
This is not to say that we should never zoom out and take stock of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we want to go. Big-picture planning retreats can be enormously fruitful, particularly if they take place before the Blessed Sacrament. But we need not throw ourselves into a daily existential crisis over our long-term plans. What if the best “plan” for right now is to send that email, fill those orders, write that essay, feed these children? Can we trust the resurrected Christ to make us new each day? Can we accept that for now, this is enough? Can we trust Him to bring glory from our toils? Can we accept that every small fiat will bear fruit, even if it’s not fruit that we will immediately see?
What God wants most from us isn’t ambition, fame, fortune, or militaristic adherence to a perfect plan. He wants our faithfulness. He wants our hearts.
He wants us.
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
As we move from Easter into Ordinary Time, let’s challenge ourselves to become like dependent children, living within our limitations and just for a time, suspending our concern about what will come next.
This is hard, particularly hard in entrepreneurship, an endeavor that can feel overwhelming in its malleability. It requires massive doses of trust in Christ. But we have allies in the community of saints. And, as we empty ourselves more and more, we will come to see that our work was never due to our own force of will, anyway: It is, and has always been, Christ through us. And He ultimately decides where and how our paths will twist and turn.
Alexandra Macey Davis is a lawyer-turned-freelance writer and author. Most recently, she has written for Verily Magazine, Coffee + Crumbs, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and FemCatholic, and she writes a monthly Substack letter called Chrism + Coffee, a call to find peace and rest in both the sacramental and the ordinary. She is the founder of Davis Legal Media, a ghostwriting and content strategy company serving the legal industry. Her first book, Pivot: The Nontraditional JD Careers Handbook, will be published in late 2023. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband and two boys.