How do I know if I am doing God’s will?
There are many people that I have met along my path who ask me for help or want to talk about their lives. Most of them ask me one of these questions: How do I know God’s will for me? Or Am I doing God’s will?
If the question itself is complex, coming up with an answer becomes even more difficult. Because it is sometimes not easy to understand what God’s will is for our lives, especially when we are surrounded by many realities, situations and responsibilities which do not allow us to see clearly.
For many people, anxiety increases even more, and the question is asked more fervently. People want to know what God’s will is in a relationship, if they will actually get married, if God wants them to have a certain job, if God wants them to stay in a community, etc.
I would like to offer some suggestions on this matter:
Don’t seek God just trying to find an answer for a specific desire that you may have.
Please read this phrase again and calmly, because I believe that it may contain the answer you have been looking for and cannot find.
I’m going to try to explain it another way:
Don’t look for an answer from God for your state of life, for example, if only you are the one who has a concern and others do not.
Do not seek an answer from God in relation to a situation you are experiencing, and only you are the one who is concerned with getting rid of the situation instead of learning from it.
What I mean by this is don’t go after God demanding answers for your desires because your desires may not be God’s priority or will for you right now.
So, if I am not to seek God to answer my desires, what am I to do?
You need to start seeking God and making him a part of your life, where you can feel Him, experience Him, and know Him.
There is a very big difference between seeking God with the desire that He respond to your desires and seeking God so that He is present in your life.
When we understand this difference, we will stop manipulating God and seeking Him only for what He can offer us; and we will begin to seek God because He is God. This should be our only reason to seek Him.
When we seek God wholeheartedly, without ulterior motives, and without masking our desires when seeking Him, we begin to purify our life and our relationship with Him.
We will no longer need to be looking for answers and solutions to life’s problems because the focus will not be on the answers that we need for ourselves, but the focus will be on God and who He is for us.
For once you seek God with your heart, once you seek God for who He is and not for what He can give you, your life will be a life fuller of God and His grace.
Even if you do not have complete clarity about your next step, it will not distress you, because you will continue walking in God until these next steps become clearer to make a decision. This is faith in action.
6 Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; 7 let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. 8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. [Isaiah 55:6-8]
I hope these words fall on your heart as a new understanding of your relationship with God and that the Holy Spirit guides you from here.
Taken from https://es.aleteia.org/
Rewritten and translated by Rev. Rafael Martinez