Growing up in Christianity, I came to understand the Will of God to essentially consists of loving God with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength & loving your neighbor as yourself.
And we do the latter by applying the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Loving Your Neighbor As Yourself
When I was young, I had a hard time with the phrase “as yourself” in the loving your neighbor part, because I struggled with negative feelings of self-worth.
I remember when I was in middle school, at the age of 12 or 13, I had this notion that other people were more important than me. That it was okay for me to let people say & do bad things about & to me — that I was to “be like Jesus” and “turn the other cheek” and then to ask God to “forgive them for they know not what they do” when the kids at school picked on me.
I remember despising my physical features and being mad at God for making me this way — and then feeling guilty for being mad at God.
I eventually managed to get over it and accept the things I couldn’t change about my physical makeup and focused on that which I could — not necessarily with my appearance, but with who I was as a person.
I became obsessed with self-improvement.
Around this time (throughout my teenage years and beyond), my parents were involved in a business venture that focused heavily on self-improvement. And I became very interested in reading self-help books & listening to motivational speakers because I wanted to be the best version of me that I could be and do great things — namely, I wanted to make the world a better place.
But in time I came to see how that interest evolved into something not-so-good. I realized that I had become obsessed with trying to improve myself, because I never believed myself to be good enough.
So, I stopped feasting on self-improvement material and sought to just do what I understood the Will of God was. (See paragraph 1.)
Is there more to it (the Will of God, that is)?
Fast forward to today (or at least in more recent times), and I find myself questioning “what is the Will of God?” Is there more to it than what I have always believed?
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