Designing our life’s game plan

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

WE need to realize that each one of us has to make some kind of game plan for his life. And the simple reason is that our life has a purpose to achieve, a goal to attain, and all these can be in different levels and aspects of our life that need to be integrated into one organic whole that is oriented toward our ultimate goal which is to be with God in heaven.

For this, we have to be very clear about the ultimate goal of our life, the real purpose of our life here on earth. We should not just be relying on some philosophy or ideology that can only give us some intellectual or political sense of destiny, and much less on some human sciences and arts that only give us some temporal goals.

Our Christian faith tells us that our life here is only like a pilgrimage, or a temporary sojourn, where we are both being trained and tested by God to see if what God wants us to be is also what we want ourselves to be. Our Christian faith tells us that we mainly have a spiritual goal and ultimately a supernatural destiny. We are meant to live in eternity, and not just in time.

As the Letter to the Hebrews would put it very clearly, “Here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (13,14) This is a truth of our faith that should always be with us, so that we would know what to do with our life here on earth in order to reach our ultimate and supernatural, eternal home with God in heaven.

We have to be wary of our strong tendency to be easily swallowed up and trapped in our temporal and earthly conditions. This is where we have to be most guarded against, because we tend to merely follow our natural laws which, if not guided by our Christian faith, has nowhere to go but fall to the level of the irrational animals that are guided only by blind instincts, blinding emotions and passions, and unstable, shifting moods.

We may be rational animals, but if our rationality is not inspired by the spirit of God, it will just be spinning around in any which way, giving us some moments of excitement and adventure, of endless discoveries, that eventually would not find its proper home.

Let’s remember that our rationality that is activated by our intelligence and will just did not come about spontaneously. It is a creation of God and is made a participation of God’s intelligence and will. Our rationality has to be properly inspired by God’s will.

That is why Christ has always been telling us that we have to be united to him as he is united to the Father, that we have to follow God’s commandments. We have to reflect this condition in our daily activities and, in fact, in our whole lifestyle.

We should have some kind of a game plan in life that would keep us always with God, referring everything to him and doing everything with him. We should avoid doing things merely on our own, depending solely on our human powers.

Might be good to ask someone trustworthy as to how to make such a game plan for our life.

            Email: roycimagala@gmail.com