Look, find, serve

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

It’s a little formula that can be helpful to us in developing and keeping a close relationship with God. We have to look for Him in everything that we do and handle so we can find him. And finding him, we can be drawn to serve him.  This, I believe, is what loving God actually entails.

We know that God is everywhere. That is in the very essence of God. It should not be hard to find him if we only exert the effort to look for him. Yes, even in our most mundane affairs, in the middle of the pots and pans or while tilling the soil in the farm or doing some intellectual study and research or engaging in some rocket science experiments and projects, we should never fail to look, find and serve God.

It should be like an instinct, a healthy obsession that we have to cultivate. This obviously goes beyond our natural powers. The grace of God is needed, but we should also do our part.

Yes, we have to pray first, asking for that grace. We have to accompany our prayers with sacrifices and recourse to the sacraments. This is how we enter into the spiritual and supernatural level of our life. But we have to do our part.

We have to thoroughly study the doctrine of our faith so we can have a good picture of who God is and of how he is related to us and vice-versa. The study should be such that we end up growing in our hunger for God. We should end up strongly drawn to him, as we learn who he really is and how much he loves us.

For this alone, we really would need a lot of time and effort. Unless God himself would appear to us in some extraordinary and miraculous way, we have no other alternative but to go through the process of studying and meditating on our faith.

We should be deeply convinced that God is present everywhere, in all our conditions, circumstances and situations, whether good or bad. More than that, we have to realize that his presence is never passive but rather active.

That is, he is always around, ever solicitous of our needs, full of love and mercy. He is actually guiding us, always intervening in our lives, ever ready to be of help. We need to fathom these realities.

In other words, we have to learn how to be truly contemplatives even while in the middle of the world, immersed in our earthly and temporal affairs. This is what is ideal for us. And we just have to make that ideal a reality, always with God’s grace and our all-out effort.

I imagine that when we do these things, we can always feel the presence of God, his nearness to us, his fatherly love for us.  We can see the divine wisdom behind all the events of our life. We would be filled with joy and peace, and be more motivated to correspond to God’s tremendous love for us.

Thus, we serve him, and because of him, we serve everybody else. We would be filled with that attitude that was once expressed by Christ who said that he came to serve and not to be served. (Cfr. Mt 20,28)

This is what true loving is. It is to give ourselves as completely as possible without expecting any return. We even give ourselves to those who do not seem to deserve being served.

Let us always pay attention to Christ’s plea to us: “Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Mt 7,7) And, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” (Mt 6,33) Let’s remember that God can never be outdone in generosity.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com