Dedicating our daily lives to God
- This page is part of an ERW course, Meeting God. By John Eagles, October 24, 2009.
To whichever good religion we adhere, the ultimate purpose is to realize our divine potential. Whether we see ourselves as children or servants of God, we do desire to be like God and to live sacred lives of love for God and others.
Each religion has traditions and routines that help us to fulfill the highest goal. There is nothing higher than to love and to be like God in our giving out love, yet how can we translate this into our daily and common activities? There is such a thing as selfish love too. For example, people sometimes love their car more than they love their own family. There exists a lot of evil in this world and when people have fallen to evil habits they sometimes like doing evil.
Religious life means to live centered on God. God wants us to give love to those around us and to have dominion over animals and plants and all things with love. Also to be included in this love is the spiritual world, the world of angels and ancestors.
To say that we can dedicate our lives to God by the love of God expressing through us is a true statement, but it doesn't yet answer the many questions how to do this in daily life. For example, how can we do the dishes in a good way? How can we furnish our houses in a heavenly way? How shall we relate to those colleagues who are in the habit of advancing their own career by trying to pull down ours? For what shall we spend our money? How should we earn our money?
It may be possible to give principled answers to each of these questions, but even when we know God's Principles very well, we still often don't know how to apply them. For example, somebody approaches us and asks a question. Out from our habit to give love we might tend be friendly and answer but suppose that this person is part of a gang and while you answer the question another gang member picks your purse from your pocket?
Principles of how to live are very necessary to know, yet cannot help us always in our daily business. Life is far too complex to always immediately know how to apply these principles. Let me give another example. You must vote for a political party. Which one are you going to choose? Should you vote at all and if you do, which candidate is the one wanted by God? We continually bump into these kinds of difficult questions.
So what is the solution? One way chosen by religious people is to simplify their lives. Someone could try to solve the problems by joining a monastery, giving up ownership of personal property, eating simple meals, praying at regular times, etc. That seems to solve some of the problems, but we are people and our lives remain complex however much we would try to simplify. It may help us for a certain period of time to live according to monastery rules but it will not bring us to the ultimate fulfillment of our lives, which at a certain level also includes having a loving family.
There is no other way than to solve these problems in a personal relationship to and communion with God. We need to advance in our religious lives to a point that we continually receive God's guidance for how to do all our daily and even petty things. In my own experience, this means that there are cases that God lets us rely on our good intuition, and there are other cases where we need and can get very concrete instructions from God.
Does this seem a high-reachable goal? I am convinced that God as our Heavenly Parents wants to help us with all that we need. For this God gives us parents or even Original Parents to teach us, teachers to guide us, but as we mature, we cannot anymore rely only on daily instructions of our parents representing God. Maturity means that we have learned to handle our own affairs in good ways. It remains our ultimate goal to keep growing to reach that individual maturity and beyond that, maturity of our relationships with spouse and children, and so forth...
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