How much effort should lay people put into discerning God's will?

Everyone should use prudence, and everyone should ask to be better confirmed God's will. Everyone should learn how to abandon themselves to Divine Providence. But does everyone equally need to know God's will? Lay people can discern what they should do, but much of their action is constrained by their duties and the rules and mores of their community. This is true of secular priests to an extent.

But at present it seems to me that those who need to discern God's will the most are those (religious) who no longer participate in the human economy, but wholly serve the Divine Economy. As a result, they need to be enlightened by Him directly as to how they are to serve Him and what they should do. Much of what the laity needs to do in order to fulfill God's will is given to them through the Natural Law, in conjunction with positive laws. The laity need to exercise prudence, as do those in religious life, but I think religious need to check that they are not presuming to be doing God's will, but must in humility ask to know whether this is actually the case.

The young do need to ask the question of whether they have a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life, but after that... maybe only with respect to great or extraordinary things or difficult cass? A parent does not need to question whether God wants him to do what is right for his children?

An old article in the Marquette Law Review, written by Anton Hermann Chroust: The Problem of Private Property According to St. Thomas Aquinas