May. 15, 2026
Love’s Plan:
The Mystery of God’s Will
Growing up in a religious household, I often heard the will of God invoked. What nuances this phrase may have held for my parents and Sunday School teachers I can’t say, but I suspect they were not much different from my own. The transcendent supreme Being had a Plan, and it was our job to discern it and trust it, even and especially when life didn’t seem to follow much of a plan at all. But honestly, whether I was trying to espy God’s will for my own life, or to fill in the gaps of understanding when tragedy or even just disappointment struck, the appeal to its mystery unsettled more than it resolved.
It was supposed to be comforting. Someone was in control, and the Someone at the helm had my best interests at heart. If the Plan didn’t always seem to bear perfect witness to the Love it was believed to embody, sin could be blamed or divine pedagogy appealed to. These were the waters we swam in, and we negotiated our way through them the best we could.
But if we are paying attention, it is a difficult position to sustain. Many terrible crimes of both commission and omission have been perpetrated in the name of God’s will. And the merely nominal freedom it retains for our own participation diminishes the human project. If there is a divine will operating in the universe, we would do well to work a
bit harder to discover it and to deliver it from the passive default position in which historical doctrines have confined it. On the way, we might release our freedom from its box as well.
What Kind of Will
As a child, injunctions to do God’s will always seemed to have a right answer and a wrong answer – do this, not that – with fairly limited consequences for making the wrong decision. But over time the choices took on a heftier load: a college, a career, a spouse. How to spend money, who to spend time with. Who to work for, who to vote for. What if I got it wrong? How could I be sure?
Many have gotten it wrong, of course, catastrophically wrong. The medieval Christian Crusades unequivocally claimed divine authority; so did the Spanish Inquisitors and transnational witch burners. Hitler repeatedly claimed to be doing “the will of the almighty Creator,” as have leaders of religious wars and colonizers of indigenous lands throughout history. What is calamitous enough under human auspices becomes diabolical when perpetrated by the religious zealot emboldened by missionary certainty.
Local damage can be just as devastating within its limited range – families and friendships sundered along ideological lines, individuals ostracized by moral judgments that have more to do with an ego-shaped will than a divine one. There would seem to be no bounds to the human capacity to rationalize destructive behavior as the will of a purportedly loving God.
But the other prevalent application of the notion does not serve us much better. The appeal to the mysteries of divine will in the face of life’s unpredictable adversities may be comforting in the short run, but theologians over centuries have had to scramble to reconcile an omnipotent and loving deity with the degree of suffering inexorably attached to the program of life. Despite the appeal to mystery to defend God’s reputation, much sincere spiritual inquiry has foundered on the question of theodicy.
Still, any concept of a God at all would seem to require a will analogous to the one we carry; an impartial God is no god at all, completely unrelatable by we who are said to be made in the divine image. No, will must be part of the divine and human equation, but it surely must have more to say.
What Kind of God
Humankind has always been inclined to seek monolithic concepts of God to answer the vagaries of life. The history of religion can be seen as the evolution of authentic spiritual experience in conversation with the human search for security and meaning. But as human consciousness has matured and employed its growing power to chart the mysteries of the universe, the nature of manifest reality has called new questions about the nature of its Source. What kind of God would give birth to a universe brimming with shifting fields of particles and energy? A universe in which the observer contributes to what is observed? What is God’s will in a cosmos in which motion and change are the norm, in which everything is interconnected and non-deterministic?
They are unsettling questions. Extrapolations from quantum models to daily life are disconcerting and illogical. They clearly challenge claims that “everything happens for a reason.” Yet they make all the difference in our revisioning of the will of God. For they show us that the nature of the reality spun from the divine Source is not static, but dynamic. Its rules are elusive, suggestive rather than predictive. Yet something holds it all together. Cosmic processes are confounding, but they nonetheless cohere sufficiently to keep the world busy creating itself. Some invisible force keeps the universe from flying apart or dissolving into nonsense; more, some wisdom draws it all together in the direction of meaning.
While science continues to search for a “unified field theory,” philosophers down the ages have not hesitated to posit a greater Reality behind the progressive reality we witness daily. What is not yet provable or explainable may nonetheless be reliably, and remarkably consistently, intuited. From Heraclitus and Buddha in the 6th century BCE, through such giants as Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the 20th, the brave and honest have perceived and proposed a reality that changes and evolves precisely because that greater Reality in which it is seated changes and evolves along with it. Whether or not they name it God, for all it is a potent lure, a Ground of eternal creativity. And all identified this creative power, one way or another, with Love. Love Creates.
What Kind of Command
Here, then, is our way back into the will of God. The will of this dynamic and constantly creating God is Love. It is the power that keeps the universe grasping its way forward in the rough-and-tumble of constant metamorphosis. It is the hope that steps into the moment of loss. In the Ground of a God who is becoming alongside and within the evolving universe, that divine will, that Love, cannot be either a static once-for-all-formula nor a perfect-choice-for-every-occasion designate. Nor will it provide an explanation to erase all the suffering of a world in flux. God’s will is to love, and the will of God for us is that we love our way through it all.
God’s will consists in no predetermined course or prescribed action, but in the life-bestowing movement of love with which we meet life. This is the will of God we must discern, for the dictates of love in one instance or for one person may be anything but love in and for the next. Whether I stand at the brink of an important decision or meet a grief beyond my comprehension, the moment itself will hold the potential for its own wise – and loving – unfolding.
This discernment is no relativizing of God’s will as we have understood it. Rather, it is the skillful living of it, calling us beyond rote application and helpless questioning. The world is new in every moment; every moment deserves our most faithful response – the response, that is, that is faithful to love’s creative power.
This alignment of our will with the divine purpose asks a lot of us. It requires the awakening of the heart within a keen assessment of circumstances. It demands the vulnerability of humility and the fearlessness of imagination. It calls forth our total engagement with the life we are summoned to advance. For it is there, and only there, in the middle, that God’s will is revealed to us.
The grand Source of life does not stand apart, transcendent from its decrees and manipulating its events. For it is also the Ground within which life unfolds freely and vitally with all the growing pains of an evolving universe. The love God wills in us will not always be gentle and comforting. It may be prophetic and loud, unsettling and wearying, faceless and thankless. It will face cataclysmic and senseless pain. But in the midst of it, the pouring of oneself into life is its own confirmation of value and purpose. It is the comfort of knowing that one is where one may serve the stream of life, the will of God.
Thus does God’s will ever renew itself, adjusting life’s potential around the boulders and trees we didn’t see or couldn’t avoid. We are freed from the mandate to detect our predestined task in a preestablished plan. There is no boat that will be missed if we get it wrong, for the only failure lies in hanging back. There are no last chances here, only next chances.
God’s will is love, period. It is that simple, and that hard. For we cannot satisfy ourselves with a cursory survey of our clear capacities and the obvious options. Love calls for the emptying of expectations, the step outside our comfort zones. It calls for open-eyed encounter, kenotic sacrifice, the transformation from merely doing God’s will into being it. It is a steep learning curve in which the learning is never complete. For the world is never complete, and that is the adventure.
God’s will is our freedom, entrusted with the act of creation. In living into and out of the Love that is God’s will, the task of the will is transformed into the fulfillment of Will, the comfort of love is transformed into the fulfillment of Love, as each step wills the only Will there is.
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