Serving Two Masters

"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." [1]

In a productive society where people work to earn a living, God is often not at the forefront since work demands much of one's energy, with relaxation and play consuming the remainder of the time.  Are therefore the words above in the Gospel of Matthew correct?  Yes and no.

Yes, if man is completely fascinated by and obsessed with possessions and wealth and God is relegated to the background, as if God is even a part of his consciousness.

No, if man balances his time between being a custodian for what is material and temporal and being a believer in what is unattainable but divine and eternal.  A day that is dedicated to work, relaxation and play does not mean God has to on the back burner all day long.  It is  possible to intersperse prayers throughout one's day, making God and the Mother of God Partners in life, sharing with Them the burdens as well as the fun.

Taking time out for prayers is not a waste of time but actually saves time even as we are pressed for time.  Man needs to consider who can achieve better results: himself alone or together with God and the Mother of God.  The answer is always the latter.

What sometimes prevents man from seeking divine assistance is pride and faithlessness.  Imagine how much better everything would be knowing that one's work is being accomplished with humility and divine assistance, even if the results are imperfect since perfection is rarely attainable outside of Heaven, than knowing that one's work is secularly-driven and is tainted with sins of greed and vengeance, even if it results in having possessions that are wished for but ill-gotten or otherwise undeserved. [2]

To avoid falling into Satan's Godless secularism, faith in God and supplication are necessary.  Faith and supplication will lead all onto the right paths so that one could make the right decisions that save both time and grief.  By incorporating prayer into work, relaxation and play, one would be serving two masters, thereby uniting two incongruous paths as one that would lead eventually to Heaven.



[1] http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6%3A24&version=KJV
[2] Sadly, a lot of bitter and envious people think that they deserve all that the world has to offer, and when they cannot afford to have what they want, they simply point to inequality.  These people are a Godless bunch for they have no gratitude for the life they have, the life that God gave them.  The other Godless bunch are hypocrites with secular power who also do not see the preciousness of life and hate the innate inequality (except their own) that comes with life.  These people believe that by allocating material wealth belonging to others to the have-nots will solve their problems.  They cannot be more wrong.  What everyone needs is fulfillment and fulfillment is not attainable by possessing material wealth.  Those who believe they can parcel out equality by edict will never have fulfillment themselves because they will never be able to balance God's scale of justice, not with all their power and influence, for God's justice is not something they would ever agree with or understand from a secular point of view.  If these people remain Godless, I pity their eventual Godless death, a death that will end in emptiness, in a Hell of eternal anger and craving for equal access to Heaven.  How one expends his or her energy life is how one will expend his or her energy in the afterlife.