If only we knew...

That is, if we only knew what God has given us, for sure we would freeze in astonishment, and once recovered, would spring to action to correspond generously to his great tremendous gift to us!

That is, if we only knew. The problem is that we hardly know about this gift because we always tend to take things for granted. We only or mainly see the physical things. Anything beyond, anything spiritual and supernatural, is at best given a lick and a promise.

We need to make some changes, even some drastic adjustments, in our way of perceiving and discerning things. We just should not stay in the level of the material, the worldly and the temporal. We have to learn to capture the spiritual, the supernatural and the eternal realities in our life.

And this means that we have to sharpen our faith, our skill at praying such that we can truly say that we are having a direct encounter with God our Father. We need to convince ourselves that this is possible and doable. Precisely God’s tremendous gift to us is he himself, his giving his own self to us, offering us whatever is good to us all the way to offering us mercy and forgiveness even if we have not yet asked for forgiveness.

It is important that we pause from time to time to consider this basic truth about God and us and to let it sink in our consciousness so as to make it the motivating and guiding principle in our life.

We may have to do a number of things to achieve this goal or ideal, and they may vary depending on the concrete conditions of each one of us. For some of us, it may be a matter of taking the word of God as found in the gospel, in the catechism, in the prayer books, etc., more seriously.

We cannot deny that for many of us, reading the gospel, for example, is just a reading exercise, or at best a purely intellectual affair. We fail to perceive the voice of God in it, encouraging us to transform ourselves in becoming more and more like Christ.

It’s about time that we allow ourselves to be ruled by a living faith that would enable us to see and hear Christ every time we read the gospel. The net effect should be that we would be moved to follow Christ more closely and even to identify ourselves with him more and more.

For others, it may be a matter of seeing that our work and study are occasions to relate us to God. Our work and study should not just be a purely technical or intellectual affair. This attitude toward our work and study should be improved.

The truth is that our work and study will always have God at their beginning and end. In fact, God should always be in the middle of these human activities. In fact, he should always be in every step of the way. Without God or putting God aside would simply put our work and study in jeopardy. They would become an occasion for all kinds of temptation and sin.

We should aim at truly becoming contemplative souls who not only believe in God, but also live with him. We should be able to see and hear him in all places and times. Our will should be in synch with God’s will, which is what is proper to us, since we are meant to be his image and likeness and to share in his life and nature.

On the part of God, he has already given us everything that we need to be as we should be according to God’s will. We have to find ways of how to effectively enable each one of us, in our distinctive conditions, to appreciate God’s tremendous gift to us!