~by Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ

When deciding what do to with our lives we can lose track of why we are alive in the first place. Decision making can get bogged down in trying to choose what will make us happy or in trying to guess the mind of God. One can get tied in a complicated knot of possibilities. Like a great Buddhist master, Ignatius would remind us to “first train in the fundamentals.” For us Christians, the fundamental of all fundamentals is – God loves us.  God, the creator of all that is, loves us. God loves, not just tolerates, us. God loves us, the imperfect, sinful, lazy, unfinished human beings. God loves us. This is why God created us and this is why we continue in existence. We are called to train in the acceptance of this reality.

We train in acceptance of God’s love because many of us just don’t believe it. Some of us have trained for years in thinking we are unworthy of God’s love; that we are a huge mess of mistakes and failure.  We spend years repeating to ourselves that nothing we do is going to be good enough to get God to love us. And further, we can doubt that God even exists and that might be alright since God is nothing but an angry judge waiting to condemn us. This is why we train; this is why we develop a prayer practice of praise that reveals us as the beloved of God.

Through a discipline of gratitude, of naming our graces we slowly come to see God loving us.  “Thank you God for this cup of coffee.” “Thank you God for smile of my friend.” “Thank you God for the bird I saw today.”  No big deal, but little by little we get more of it. God loves us. And this becomes the ground on which we stand, the air we breathe.

The more deeply we know that God loves us the more secure we become in making our decisions. We are loved by God and we are free to choose how to respond. First the love and second the choices. God loves us and we learn to love God.