You work from home. Your laptop is a necessity. It's your only source of income. One day, right in the middle of a major project, your laptop crashes. You panic. Once you've calmed down, you call your company's IT department for help.
The tech arrives and spends about two hours fixing your laptop. As he's leaving, he says, “You can prevent this from happening again if you run the included diagnostic software. It will warn you about problems and suggest fixes.”
Relieved that your laptop is working again, you get back on-task with that project. An hour in, you recall your earlier panic and decide to run the diagnostic software. Just to be safe. It only takes about ten minutes. You get a big green thumbs-up on the screen. Great! Back to work.
Another hour in and you start feel like your machine is teetering on the edge of breaking down. There's no objective reason for feeling this way. It's working just fine. But there's something comforting about knowing for sure that all is well. You run diagnostic mode again. Again, big green thumb. Whew.
Each time you use diagnostic mode, you lose about ten minutes of productivity. Add to that number the cost of disrupting your focus.
This pattern of running diagnostic mode several times a day continues through the month. Everything is fine. But you can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. Then it hits you: what if the diagnostic mode is malfunctioning? What if the software designed to tell you what's broken is itself broken?
You call the IT department. The tech checks out your machine and assures you that all is well. Though you are relieved, doubts linger. What if the tech is wrong? Maybe he missed something. Maybe his diagnostic software is faulty. . .
And the cycle of relief, anxiety, doubt continues rolling along until you're fired b/c you're spending half your working day diagnosing your laptop.
If you allow it, this is what the Devil does to your spiritual life. Rather than spending your time growing in holiness through prayer, fasting, etc. you obsess over what's wrong, what could be wrong, what will be wrong in the future. You spend your time looking for fixes to problems that don't exist and will probably never exist. The really insidious part of this cycle is that you come to believe that Diagnostic Mode is what your spiritual life is supposed to look like.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the occasional diagnostic scan of your spiritual life. But being in a constant state of diagnosis is damaging.
Pray, fast, give alms, read spiritually beneficial literature; build good friendships; celebrate the sacraments, and stop wasting your time and energy on endless diagnostic scans.
