How Can I Discern God’s Will for My Life?

What is God’s Will?

People often come to me because they’re in the midst of a major change in their life—a birth, a career decision, a life-stage, a time of loss and grief—and need to find their way to what’s next.

Others come to me unsure of why they need spiritual companionship; they just have a sense they need to be here, and trust that the reason will be revealed as we work together.

Entire books have been written about how to know God’s will for our life. But what IS that will? What does it look and feel like when something IS God’s will? And how do we respond to God’s will?

If it’s true, as Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now, that we are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold, then that’s big, right? HUGE. We can make a difference in the world. All of us have a purpose.

At the same time, as Leslie D. Weatherhead writes in his Christian classic, The Will of God, God starts with us wherever we are, with what we have to work with: what our life is telling us, and the meaning our religious traditions or spiritual practices can reveal in what we’re experiencing.

Is God’s Will Simply Resigning Ourselves to Circumstances?

At the same time, let’s not confuse acceptance and clarity with resignation to circumstances.

Resigning ourselves means tolerating something we don’t like but which we see as inevitable. Acceptance is consenting to receive or undertake something that’s offered to us.

It’s the difference between “I have to” and “I get to.”

Let’s say someone’s spouse or partner dies; sometimes a religious person will try to be helpful and say it was God’s will, and so one needs to accept it. That can be brutal. And stupid. And not helpful at all. That’s a good way to lose a friend, whether one is a person of faith or not.

God’s will is not just a matter of giving in to whatever happens. It involves effort on our part to notice what happens in our daily life and pay attention to how we feel in response to it, and then act accordingly.

Let’s say we didn’t get that job or promotion we wanted so much. Maybe we comfort ourselves by saying, “It must not have been meant to be,” implying that the universe or God has other plans. But the comfort doesn’t last long, and we soon find ourselves more discontented with our current situation than before.

This is an example of resignation, where we essentially tell ourselves a lie in order to gut it out a little longer. But that longing for being appreciated, or a better use of our skills, or a bigger paycheck is still there. We know deep down we are worth more—that we are worthy.

Life is for Learning

Making progress and finding meaning might be more a matter of paying closer attention to what happens in our life each day and maybe capturing those things briefly in writing before we go to sleep—as a way of reviewing what happened, how it made us feel, and what action it might be pointing us toward for the next day.

People do this in business and education all the time: track progress, often measuring it, rewarding it, and creating incentives for doing more of what’s working well. Grades, feedback, and advancement are a part of every experience we have with school at each level.

In business, we reward quality work with promotions, and the achievement of goals with commissions or bonuses or both. If we’re doing well at work, we may look forward to a supervisor’s appraisal of our performance and the attendant salary increase.

At the same time, unless we went to Catholic school, we probably didn’t have the same experience with matters of the heart and soul. Or the tactics of that educational system were such that we ended up bruised and traumatized by the experience. One’s experience of God is so personal and individual, it seems cruel and controlling to measure and reward it in the same way we do in work or school situations.

Far better to develop a way to notice this internally.

How Can I Tell if Something is God’s Will, or Not?

What if there was a way to intentionally become more conscious and awake to our inner and outer life, to pay attention, and grow in wisdom and our capacity for self-reflection?

And what if it saved us hours and money spent on therapy, and gave us the tools for making changes NOW?

Ignatius of Loyola was not just the founder of the Jesuit order. I think of him as a person more like you and me. He spent the early part of his life in his native Spain not as a priest or monk but as a soldier and military leader. He was raised in a wealthy family to trust in his capacity to make things happen and influence others–in fact, as a person raised in privilege, he expected it. He eagerly read the stories of great military and political leaders, and absorbed the myths and legends of the heroes of history and culture.

When he was seriously injured and laid-up for months recovering, he ran out of this kind of reading material, and because the hospital at which he was recovering was a Christian institution, he began to rethink his approach to living his life. Clearly, he thought he had the most control of his life where he actually had the least, and the limits of his physical and mental capacities were revealed by his injury, recovery and all that time for reflection.

Like many people stopped in their tracks by something over which they have no control, Ignatius struggled at first, but then began to see his life in a new light. His life’s purpose might not be to return to the cavalry and conquest of his previous years, but to live a humbler existence guided by reflection, sacred story, attentiveness to the everyday, and service to the poor. He had always been a person of action; now, his active life had a new direction, toward serving rather than conquering.

How is God’s Will a Tool for Change?

Ignatius applied his experiential style of learning toward what God might be telling him and others through their life experiences. Truth was to be found not just in books but in what their lives were saying. Ignatius looked for God in all things—in nature, imagination, and creativity as well as in the written word, the Church’s sacraments, and the traditional “spiritual” disciplines of prayer, contemplation, and meditation.

He began to reflect on each day’s tasks and experiences systematically and honestly, and on how he felt in response to them. He devised a simple practice called the “examination of conscience”—the Examen, for short. He would note each day where he felt the presence of God in a particular activity or task, or where he didn’t feel that presence so much.

This became helpful at attending to relationships and self-improvement because the more he paid attention to what he was doing and how it felt, the more conscious he was of where God was showing up, where love was present, where the experience of grace was most evident. And he could spend more time in those pursuits and less time doing things in which God, and love, and grace were less evident.

How Do We Do God’s Will?

Of all the practices I’ve tried in my life, this daily, brief journalling of each day’s high and low point has been life-altering for me. It has become the most powerful tool I use for changing how I live. At the end of each day (or sometimes, if I’m really tired, the next morning) I think back on the day just past and write these things down. Then, each month, I look back over what I’ve written and notice if there are trends. Am I stuck in hurtful patterns of activity or thought in my life? Are there repeated interactions with people or situations where I experience giving and receiving love, or grace, or spontaneous joy, and if so, what was I doing when they happened?

These can often reveal hints of what God’s will is in our lives.

I was not taught to value my experience enough as evidence of God’s will. Often, our family experience or a religious upbringing can mean learning to look outside oneself for guidance or feedback in the form of reward and approval or disapproval and punishment, in some situations. Many people grow up unconsciously being taught to distrust their feelings or thoughts about experiences.

Ignatius believed these things were often the most important indicators of whether something was part of God’s will for a person. Discerning the will of God is often simpler than we’ve been led to believe. Discernment itself needs to involve both head and heart, for both are divine gifts that the universe uses to bless us so that we can bless others, too.

For more information on Discernment, take a look at this post. The Examen can work hand in hand with other tools for discernment, whether you face a big decision or a small one.

And if your life is inviting you to listen more closely to it, I can be of help to you a spiritual companion. Why not contact me at 612-470-2366, or email me at rickspiritualcompanion@gmail.com for a free consultation today, virtually or in person?