Discerning the Will of God

What does it mean to follow God's will? Does it mean that God has a plan for our lives and that if we're not in the right place we've somehow left the will of God? These are important questions and many people struggle with them.

I suspect that God's will for each and every one of us is not very much like a holiday plan or itinerary in which each detail has been planned and in which any deviation means that we've departed from the plan and are in trouble.

No, God’s will for us – His plan for our lives – is simply that you and I achieve salvation, which is union with Christ – theosis.

The details of our lives are not “planned out in advance” as if choosing something else means we've left God behind, or so that we have to repent if we choose something else. Such makes a mockery of God (as if we could ever go somewhere in which He is absent) and His gift to us of free will. The details of our lives are what we as free beings freely choose, and what others in their free-will choose for themselves and for us, for we are all inter-connected, and just as our decisions take us places and often drag others along with us, so do the choices and decisions of others. God’s will for us – His desire and plan for our lives – is that we find Him in all of these various and often unpredictable details of life, and that finding Him we return to Him if necessary and cleave to Him, .

The point about living in the will of God – living according to His plan – is not that we are constantly second-guessing our decisions to do this or do that, or the manner in which we have ended up doing this or that, for not everything is in our control, but that in every moment we seek union with God, and ask not “Is this what God had planned for me?” but rather, “Where is God in this, and how can I draw closer to Him in this and through this?”

Only this way can we truly say, "Glory to God for all things!"