Found the Treasure

“To do your will, O my God, is my delight, ​and your law is within my heart!” Psalm 40:8

Aleteia is an online Catholic news and information website and I find many inspiring stories there. In their Spanish edition they published an amazing article last December about a young, beautiful, and terribly intelligent woman named Montserrat Medina Martinez. Montse, as she is called, was very successful in her field. After a doctoral fellowship in Computational Mathematics in Stanford, she founded Jetlore, a digital marketing company. Through data analysis, Jetlore creates personalized content for companies like eBay, PayPal, Uniqlo, etc. It raised $10.6 million in financing, and PayPal got interested in it and bought it. As an expert in artificial intelligence, and for her success in business, Montse has won several prestigious awards.

But one day, she changed her resume in LinkedIn to a personal testimony which reads “Servant of God”. She also wrote a long letter to her partners in Deloitte:

“It is with great regret that I have to say goodbye to Deloitte. I have decided to drop everything and respond to what I believe is a call from God to follow him more closely...The only thing I know for sure is that I have found “the treasure” and, as the Gospel says, I want to sell everything I have in this world to buy it (cf. Mt 13: 44-46). I feel that, by supporting this call, my life acquires a meaning full of light, which makes me feel blissful and happy. "

“Thus, as a self-proclaimed "good Catholic" for my physical attendance at the Sunday Eucharist, but proud of the glory, power and money that I was obtaining, my soul was building a privileged place in the abyss of nonsense of a life locked in selfishness. I cannot find words to describe the deplorable state in which my soul found itself while I deceived myself, convinced that it pleased God. After all, I thought I must be doing something right: I was pushing myself and I saw the reward....

“I have lived 12 years "succeeding" according to the parameters of the world: I have degrees from the prestigious Stanford University, I have founded a startup in Silicon Valley that has acquired a Fortune 100 and at only 34 years I became a partner at Deloitte. I said to the Lord: Look how well I have used your talents. But feeling a deep knowledge of the dirt in my soul, I realized my misunderstanding regarding the desired "perfection" that I was looking for in the things of the world, and the closer I got to it, the further I got away from the true one: the perfection of the soul that consists in doing the will of God, true fullness for which we have been created....

“That is why I have made the most important and at the same time the simplest decision of my life. I have decided, without any regrets, to stop investing in my earthly future and start investing in my future for eternal life...”

Monste now lives a life of a contemplative consecrated nun in an Augustinian monastery.