Knowing God's Will

How often do we complain, "If only I knew what God's will is for me!" Sometimes we are so specifically goal directed in our discernment that everything else - what turns out to be the very significant "everything else" in our lives - gets ignored. It seems to fall out of the realm of consideration in terms of what is God's will. How easy it is, and how much is a type of "Freudian slip," to ignore the everyday, the common place, the routine. Could it also be a case of denial?

Our first Office of the day is the Office of Readings; Psalms followed by a reading from Sacred Scripture and a second reading, often a sort of commentary on the first. This morning the second reading was a continuation of a treatise of the Lord's Prayer by St. Cyprian, bishop and martyr. It concludes with this description of what it is to do God's within ourselves. This is what we are to be doing as we discern, as we travel on to that ultimate question of God's will in our lives. This is God's will for the DAILY.

All Christ did, all he taught, was the will of God. Humility in our daily lives, an unwavering faith, a moral sense of modesty in conversation, justice in acts, mercy in deed, discipline, refusal to harm others, a readiness to suffer harm, peaceableness with our brothers and sisters, a whole-hearted love of the Lord, loving in him what is of the Father, fearing him because he is God, preferring nothing to him who preferred nothing to us, clinging tenaciously to his love, standing by his cross with loyalty and courage whenever there is any conflict involving his honor and his name, manifesting in our speech the constancy of our profession and under torture confidence for the fight, and in dying the endurance for which we will be crowned - this is what it means to wish to be coheir with Christ, to keep God's command; this is what it means to do the will of the Father.