How Can We Find God's Will?

1 Thes 5:16 Be joyful always; 17pray continually; 18give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

As a spiritual director and teacher, I often have the experience of people asking me about how they can come to discover God's will for their lives. Actually, it is the most commonly asked question that I encounter among God's people. There is much to say about divine guidance. However, I believe the place to begin to get our bearings is not to fret about discerning the details, but to create the kind of atmosphere around our souls, our lives and our inter-personal relationships in which the Holy Spirit is free to express Himself--His "natural habitat" if you will.

The above 3 simple verses speak to the nature of this Spirit-rich environment. God's will for our lives is embedded and encoded in these three apostolic injunctions and...on a basic level, His "will" is the same for us all. God's will is not, first of all, about a geography, a vocation, finding a certain set of human relations, a task to do, a gift to utilize or a ministry to accomplish. It is, rather, something within the grasp of each one of us...even if we have strayed from God's will.

We begin by stopping in our tracks and connecting with the Trinity from the depths of our hearts. I actually like to work backwards through this "trinity" of commands to again find my centered-ness in God.

1. There is always something in our lives about which to be grateful to God. Locate those things and give Him your thanks.

2. Start, or restart, your running dialog with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Relate with Him in "real time" to everything in your life--the good, the bad, the sad, the difficult, the great, the small and so on. He is the Wonderful Counselor and He will be that to us if we only invite Him to interact with us in the intimate conceptions, attitudes, motivations, meditations, musings, responses, reactions, temptations, failings and successes within our souls that no human being can perceive. In addition to "saying prayers", there is a hidden stream of prayer that is well able to run its subterranean course beneath the surface of our busy lives that are occupied with so many responsibilities, pressures and spiritual warfare. Undergirding our occupations can be a marvelous preoccupation--talking and listening to God.

3. It seems to me that the only possible way we can actually find the grace from God to always be joyful is greatly dependent upon experiencing these first two things. The essence of joy, then, must be about simply enjoying a genuine friendship with God...right in the midst of a broken and very imperfect world... right in the midst of my sorrows and griefs...and even in the face of my trials, temptations and my various failures. Could it be that God is not intimidated by these things and doesn't back off from me...as I so often would if I were He? Maybe there is such a reality in this world as being "joyful always" after all.

If the third command (in my reordered list) seems too difficult for us to reach, let's try the first two and see where they may lead us!