Let me state:
The work of God isn't really work.
It's doing the right thing for other people first.
Then second, it's feeling the love in your heart when good things follow.
Today's quote:
"Life is really consciousness of Me. Let it be a new life in which every single happening, event and plan you are conscious of Me. Be in all things led by the Spirit. And the consciousness of me must bring joy."
makes sense for me again and again.
Over the weekend, Homeless not Hopeless, Inc. CEO founder Billy Bishop and I did a service at the Chatham Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, after which the audience was so receptive to the idea of helping Billy help the homeless. Billy said it was the nicest group of people he ever met.
As we drove up, I asked him what he wanted to say. He replied, "I'm going to talk about important things. People are sleeping in the woods. People are dying. You can help stop that."
It's that simple. And it's that difficult. People don't realize or accept how easy it is, how important it is, and how vital it is to take the good works of God into their own hands, act them, and witness the world reaping the benefits.
World, life, God--whatever you want to call it--will offer you up challenges on any given day. The world is so screwy because on the majority of occasions, people choose to act for their own selfish, egocentric reasons. They act out of fear. They act out of lust. They act out of greed. They act out of anger.
Then they suffer, and we all suffer with them.
The desired trait I find far more appealing than happiness is contentment. To be content, my experience tells me that there a few steps to follow every day:
1. Pray to and be grateful to God.
2. Be on the lookout for challenges, problems, points of conflict, then take each one as a lesson from God.
3. Respond to those challenges in ways that work out win/win or with you as a humble servant to the problem.
4. Count as many blessings as you can that you receive or witness each day.
Related to point 4: people tend to smell the flowers, but only when prompted. For years, I separated myself from understanding God via a rational sytems thinking, which counted every curse of humanity as proof of the fallacy of believing in God. Finally, I shifted to the more empirical method of counting up, rather than counting against. With this method, each sunset counts for, each quiet, beautiful morning, each kind act, every moment of cooperation, every lawn, every blade of grass.
The evidence for God is all around. The work of God is in our minds in our hands, in our actions, and the resulting deeds. That is the good. The good is God.
