God’s will

What I never understood about the notion of God’s will or any one of the many permutations of it, e.g. God “speaking” to us, God “answering” our prayers, God’s “calling” for each of our lives, is that no one ever seems to provide a viable tool to realistically disentangle truth from the incomprehensibly convoluted web of circumstances within this world. The battle for truth, purpose, and the meaning of life is very far from being as clear-cut, black and white, and straightforward as some people make it out to be. 

While our lives are filled with blessings in disguise, with oppressive trials that turn out to be the source of our greatest lessons, they are simultaneously riddled with misfortune in the guise of blessings, with ostensible miracles and joyful prosperity that in actuality causes us to let our guard down, to relent in our vigilance and foster in us a deep sense of complacency or dissatisfaction, enabling our very own downfall. There are seemingly ruthless and heartless perpetrators that turn out to be victims of unimaginably dreadful circumstances, and purportedly benevolent and altruistic heroes that turn out to be parasites, exploiting the systems we operate under and undermining the fabric of humanity. 

And the most confounding notion of all is that the majority of events or individuals are arguably neither, occupying the uncomfortable nebulous lacunae not only between absolutes, but even between our specific categorizations within the spectrum. The reality is that all the things that exist or occur in our world possess a degree of nuance that we often cannot foresee.

Certainly, not everyone is going to interpret each message from God lucidly and unambiguously, that is, if he is even sending any message to begin with. Plenty of people in the past that claim to have communicated with God have been led astray, and others may have actually communicated with him and lived a life indeed according to his will. The question then inevitably becomes: how do we distinguish a delusion from God’s will? How do we know that these curious thoughts that seemingly wander into our consciousness—these purported answers to our prayers, these words that call and inspire us to do something—are willed by God, by Satan, or, better yet, by ourselves? Is there something inherent to God’s message to us that allows us to be certain it is indeed him? And if so, why is he only sending that message to certain people? And why do we think that the only way he communicates is by directly inserting himself into our consciousness? As I posited in my reflection on prayer requests, I refuse to believe that God is so naive and unjust to arbitrary pick and choose on a whim who he will and will not choose to “speak” with. 

“Don’t make it seem God has done something when, perhaps, he didn’t do anything at all.”