Growing up in Christianity, I came to understand the Will of God to essentially comprise 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?
Last year I started paying more attention to the idea that before there was God, Creator of heaven and earth, there was simply the Creator. And I began to reframe my understanding of who God was by considering who the Creator was, void of the Bible.
In other words, if I had never been exposed to the Bible, I began to wonder what my understanding of the Creator and His Will would be?
And it became obvious to me: He would be all about life.
The Creator is all about Life!
Of course, this came at a time after being heavily immersed in the study of Genesis 1 for many years. But even still, when trying to be objective it seemed self-evident that if He created the natural world to be brimming with plant life and then all of its natural inhabitants to be full of the breath of life, that was obviously His will: to give life.
So then, my question came to be, what is His Will for humanity?
Given the nature of this world and the nature of man with the capacity and drive to continue living and procreate, that became self-evident as well. It is His will for mankind to continue living and procreate.
So, being the logical person that I am, the next question that came to mind was how?
How is mankind to continue living and procreate? <– And this is what I understand our mission in life is — to learn how to do this and then do it.
Continue living and procreate.
This seems so elementary and even silly to lay this information out like this, but I’ve come to realize it is necessary to communicate this idea.
Why? Because there appears to be so many people who don’t pay enough attention to this and abide by it.
In our culture we have been raised to operate in a certain way of life.
A Certain Way of Life
As children we go to school to learn things while our parents go to work to make money.
The money that is made is then used to pay for the things that help us live: housing, utilities, waste management, food, clothing, energy, transportation and fuel, and a means for communication with those at a distance from us, etc.
All the while, as children we are learning how to live in this way of life — how to one day grow up and make money of our own, so we can participate in the overall economy of goods and services in order to obtain the necessities (and luxuries) of life, too.
And this way of life is destroying us & the natural world and has torn our families & communities apart.
Endure to the end.
Then, we have religious institutions, such as Christianity and movements born out of it, indoctrinating the masses to focus more heavily on spiritual life, both in the now and in the hereafter, leading many to believe that there is a spiritual life after physical death.
And through this process, we are told that this physical life is something we must endure, and a carrot of hope is put & kept before us to keep us going. That carrot is the notion that the spiritual life after physical death is better than the physical life we have today.
But this is a fantasy — an imagination of man. There is no evidence of a spiritual life existing after physical death.
We are taught — and many of us from a very young age that we must accept this notion on faith. And many people do.
Now, I’m not saying that this notion is untrue, but what I am saying is that this belief has caused many to shirk their physical lives and just muddle through the way of life in which they were raised. And they sincerely believe that this is the will of our Creator.
In buying this notion, people are surrendering their lives — they are essentially offing themselves. And the Will of our Creator is not being met.
There is a better way.
People need to realize this physical life we’ve been given may very well be the only life we get. And this natural world is designed to sustain us for at least 100 years (given the evidence of many who live that long), but we must learn how to live (and not die prematurely) in it.
The way of life that most of us have been living is clearly destructive — and there is no fixing it.
The only solution is to find another way to live & pursue that like our life depends on it, because frankly, it does.
The natural world is not going to end.
Despite what religious traditions and teachings may have to say, there is no evidence that this natural world is going to come to an end or that someone is going to swoop down out of the sky and take us up to heaven to live forever and ever.
All evidence suggests that when we die, it’s over — so, I say, let’s make the most of this life while we can — let’s shoot to live for a hundred years!
Let’s find that better way to live and pursue that today, and everyday hereafter for as long as we draw breath.
(My husband and I are personally seeking to pursue this way of life, and we are continually looking for others to network with us.)
