Ostium Catholic

Paul asks a pointed question in today's first reading: am I now currying favor with human beings or God? Or am I seeking to please people? He answers it plainly. If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a slave of Christ. It's a sharp line to sit with in any career, where pleasing the right people is often treated as the entire job description rather than a side effect of doing good work.

Most professional environments run on a quiet, unspoken audience. The boss whose opinion drives every decision, the peer group whose approval feels like validation, the imagined future employer who might someday read a LinkedIn profile. None of that is inherently corrupt. The trouble starts when the audience becomes the actual reason for the work, rather than a byproduct of work done for better reasons.

The Good Samaritan offers a useful contrast. He stops for a stranger with nothing to offer him professionally or socially in return, no network benefit, no reputational upside, nothing but the cost of stopping. The priest and the Levite, by contrast, had entirely respectable, defensible reasons to keep walking, reasons that would have made perfect sense to anyone reviewing their decision afterward. Sometimes the professionally defensible choice and the actually right one point in different directions, and it's worth being honest about which one usually wins when they do.

Ask plainly this week: is there a decision currently in front of you where the safe, well-regarded choice and the genuinely right one have quietly diverged? Paul's line about pleasing people rather than God is worth testing against it directly.

Identify one decision this week where doing the right thing and doing the well-regarded thing aren't the same. Choose the right one, even if nobody notices, and don't mention that you did.

Lord, I've spent real energy trying to please the wrong audience. Free me from that, and let me be a servant of you rather than a performer for everyone watching. Amen.