Always with God while in the midst of the world

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THIS is the ideal condition for us to be in. Given the way we are, as willed by God himself, our Creator and Father, we need to be always with him all the time even as we go through our earthly and temporal affairs. To acquire the art and skill for this is definitely a very important, if not an indispensable, requirement of our life. More than that, to have the very spirit of God is the bottom line of our life here on earth.

This does not mean that we have to stay away from the things of the world. Rather, we have to learn to love the world without being worldly, trapped in its ways without leading us to God.

The secret for this is to see to it that our mind and heart are always with God. We should not allow ourselves to be fully taken by the charms and deceiving allurements of the world. A certain sense of vigilance and detachment is needed so that we avoid ignoring God as we engage in our worldly affairs.

But yes, we need to love the world and the things in it the way God loves them. After all, God created them and all he created is good. We just have to understand the true nature and purpose of the world. It has been created for us to be tested whether what God wants us to be—that is, to be his image and likeness, children of his, sharers of his life and nature—is also what we want ourselves to be.

We have to be wary when we get swallowed up by our earthly and temporal affairs, making them the main objective in our life rather than a mere occasion and means for us to achieve our real goal as defined for us by our Creator. The world is supposed to be only a pathway to heaven where we truly belong. The proper attitude we should have toward the world is to love it without becoming worldly.

That is the challenge! So, the question to ask is: How does God love it so we can also love it the way he does? We just cannot rely on our ideas and ways of loving the world, because without God, that loving would be suspicious at best.

Let’s remember that as Creator, God has given everything in the world its proper nature and laws whose purpose is nothing other than to give glory to himself. We on our part can only use and develop the world properly when we respect the God-given nature and laws of everything that is in it. More than that, we should try to discern how each thing in the world becomes a living part of the abiding providence of God over all of us.

We have to be wary of our tendency to ignore the designs of God in the world and to simply pursue our own personal interests, leading us to fall into self-indulgence. Rather, what we should try to do is act as a Christian leaven that infuses the Christian spirit in all our worldly and temporal affairs.

This duty to be a leaven for the world is actually very doable, because what is needed first of all is the intention to do so. We may not be doing something with big public significance or some external manifestation, but with the little ordinary things that we do everyday and done with faith and love for God and for others, we can already effectively leaven the world.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com