IF WE WOULD embark on the great adventure of limitless being, we must be willing to release ourselves and our desires to the will of God. Many persons take a dim view of such a gloomy sounding prospect, perhaps because they have never known God or the nature of God. They do not know a God of joy, only a God of sorrow and suffering. Their vision might be clouded by deeply ingrained concepts of a God of wrath, judgment, and revenge. In God, there is no suffering, no sadness, and no pain.
When we surrender to the will of God, we release ourselves to unlimited joy and fulfillment. What this surrender will do in our experience, we need not know. We have only to be willing to let God guide us. Then we will not be buffeted about by the winds of chance and change. Instead, we will be led step by step up a straight and narrow path, which eventually broadens into a great highway, infinity itself, expressing as limitless joy, peace, love, and fulfillment. This is God’s will for each of us. In our surrender to that will, God expresses and fulfills Himself as us, and always in an individual way.
If an idea of something to do comes to us as the fruit of spiritual unfoldment, the means for accomplishing it will be provided. But if it is our personal will or idea, it may succeed or it may fail. With a spiritual idea there are no ifs, ands, or buts. We can be sure that every spiritual idea embodies its own fulfillment.
When a spiritual idea related to business comes, whatever is necessary will be provided: customers, capital, employees, or wise management. If specific information is needed, divine wisdom leads us right to that information. Divine intelligence provides for the fulfillment of the activity every step of the way. It is amazing how Spirit works when we are willing to surrender our desires and become beholders of God’s activity.
Each of us came into this world for a unique and specific purpose that no one else can quite fulfill. Spirit planted in the midst of us has individualized as you and as me for a reason. We can never discover, however, what the reason is by humanly evaluating our capabilities and capacities. It can be discovered only as we become inwardly still, turning within and seeking the answers to such questions as: Why am I here? Why was I brought forth into this experience at this particular time? What is the work that is given me to do? What is the plan for me?
We think we know what we should do, and this is where we lose our way. We are much too full of “I want to do this; I want to achieve that.” The Spirit within may have an entirely different purpose for us, and we might miss it completely unless we become attuned to divine guidance and direction. Only as we fulfill the divine purpose does life take on real meaning and become what it was meant to be, a joy.
There is divine activity in operation. It never ceases. This balanced rhythmic activity of Spirit functions as fulfillment. It does not matter what our background is or what our past experience has been. God knows no barriers to fulfillment in expressing as us. It does not matter what our age is, and this is a “toughie” because we live in a youth-oriented world. Nevertheless, God still expresses as us.
The only thing that can stop this expression is our unwillingness to surrender our desires. So, in our silent meditation and prayer, let us be receptive and responsive to the spiritual impulse and then go about doing the work of the day wherever we are and whatever the nature of our work.
Even if we are unemployed, let us be employed about the Father’s business of praising God and being. Too many people think that waving some kind of magic wand will bring what they need to them. Not so; the spiritual life is a way of action. Each of us prepares the way for the next step by doing the work at hand today. It may be washing dishes, sweeping floors, pounding a typewriter, keeping books, selling, managing a business or a household. It matters not what it is. What does matter is our recognition that this is the work that has been given us to do today.
If we are not happy doing that work, instead of dwelling on our unhappiness and discontent, sitting and thinking, “Oh, if I were in some other place, in those ‘green pastures’ over there on the other side of the fence, all would be well,” we accept what we are doing as the work given us to do today and do the best job we can do at the moment.
Nothing is going to happen in our experience of a genuinely fulfilling nature unless it first happens within. The spiritual life begins within, and only as we find fulfillment, satisfaction, and contentment within does it show forth outwardly. Therefore, the first thing to remember in fulfilling the divine plan is to begin doing what we have to do right now.
Sometimes it looks as if we are failures. But failure can be an opportunity. It isn’t what happens out here that is so important; it is how we respond to what is going on out here. Our responses come from inside us. If we have felt that doors have closed upon us one after another, let us open the door within, for this door leads to infinity. The purpose and plan for each of us will be revealed if we will but listen. If we live this minute, now, doing the work that is given us to do with all our heart, our mind, and our soul, doing it as well as we possibly can, if it is not the work for us or the plan for us, it will be as if the hand of God reaches up and takes us out of where we are and puts us where we should be.
Infinity is the measure of our being, but we settle for a tiny segment of infinity. In fact, we settle for even less than that because we have accepted the bondage imposed upon us by world beliefs in economic cycles, lack of opportunity, and limited individual capacity. We settle for human activity with all its competition, struggle, and striving, when all the time this Presence within us, which is love, is knocking at the door of our consciousness, begging us to listen to guidance and direction. Sometimes we seem to get kicked around but only so that we wake up because the Presence is saying to us, if we will but hear it, “I am come; I, the Spirit of God, am come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly, not just a little bit of life, but all of life.”
Over and over this message may sing itself within us, not necessarily in these words, but we will have an awareness of it if we will but wake up and trust it. We need not be afraid for any circumstance or condition, for wherever we are, there is the Spirit of God, which makes this place holy. Right here, no matter where “here” is, is the presence of God, and therefore it is hallowed ground. Right here are the “green pastures” of spiritual realization and fulfillment.
It requires only inner silencing of all wants and desires in the realization of the promise that it is God’s good pleasure to give us the whole kingdom, to give us completeness and fulfillment. Just think of the gift that has been given to us: the kingdom of God within us! Could we have anything more? It is all here inside us, in our consciousness, and it is the gift of God, the grace of God. This love knows no obstacles, no barriers, and even then sometimes the light within us, which is always shining brightly, shines right through the barrier so that to us it is no longer a barrier.
There is a plan for every one of us. We find it by doing the job we have to do now, by doing it not with the attitude of how are we ever going to get through this day, but with a sense of service, a sense of giving of ourselves. There are some who want to do just as little as they can do and yet get paid as much as possible. It never works this way. We are never paid for more unless we are willing to do more. The recognition and the reward come, but they are the by-products of our realization that this minute, today, now, we are doing the work that God within us, our own divine consciousness, has given us to do. Then there is no work that is too hard; there is nothing demanded of us that is impossible to fulfill, if we but know the demand is coming from within and that it is the work that God has given us to do.
For each of us there is a way, a work, an activity in which to engage, and, it is never quite the same for any two persons. In this world, living from personal knowledge, we meet with competition and struggle for place and power. Not so when we release ourselves to the will of God. Then we realize that God does the work. “He performeth the thing that is appointed for me to do”; He makes perfect the work that is given us to do. Only let us be in tune with God’s impartation, with God’s revelation of Himself as us. When we become inwardly still, which does not mean blankness or deadness, but silencing of all wants, divine wisdom is imparted to us and points the way we should go.