Most of my life I've considered God's will as a bull's-eye to hit square on. If you miss the bull's-eye, you miss God's will. Since each moment of life comes as a unique moment of opportunity, to miss the bull's-eye at any point means to run the risk of missing all the moments that would flow out of that opportunity. It's a dicey proposition.
It seemed easier to miss God's will than to do God's will. I think many of us have lived with that fear. Some of us, because God's will seemed so out of reach, gave up altogether.
I think differently about God's will these days. I don't talk so much about doing God's will as I talk about being God's will. Doing God's will implies that the bull's-eye speaks to what we do with our lives, how we earn a paycheck, what we do to pay the bills, how we spend our time.
"Should I move there or stay here?"
"Should I take this job or that job?"
Doing God's will involves our choices and decisions. It entails our actions, where I do and what I do.
On the other hand, being God's will is simply another way of saying that the first issues in life concern our being, our essence, the core of our life.
Who we are is more important than what we do. We don't hear that message often from culture. We are enculturated to do, do, do. Our compulsion, therefore, is toward doing the will of God.
Being God's will means that our first task in the spiritual life is attending to the God-connection within us, allowing God to birth in us the person God created us to be. We attend to what lives in us at soul-level. We open our lives at the deep layers of our being in order to be shaped and formed by God's Spirit.
In order to live in this state of being, we are invited to some sense of our original purpose. Why am I here? For what purpose did God create me? What does my original and authentic self add up to? What unique essence has God placed at the core of my soul?
This sense of being gets worked into my life as the spirit or essence with which I do whatever it is I do. So rather than find a bull's-eye of doing, I express my unique personhood in whatever I do.
It also means that I carry my unique being or essence wherever I am. God's will -- and my life -- becomes transportable. God's will is not about living in a particular location or having a certain job. Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I live life with a certain spirit, a particular essence that is the fingerprint of God within me.
Being God's will is more important than doing God's will. In fact, being precedes doing. If you do it out of your unique connection to God, you can do God's will anywhere . . . as long as you take your self there.
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