Have you ever really thought about what it means to love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind?
Yep, yep, yep, got it, yep, what is the entire meaning and purpose of life, got it, check, yep.
I have always preferred to skip over to the next commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. This makes sense to me, this is something on which I can base a theory about the meaning of life: each one of our perspectives is skewed by our own wants and desires, so our view of reality is false. In order to become enlightened, we must love one another so that we can develop a true… one second, you missed a part. What does loving God have to do with it?
What is God? What does love look like?
For fun, let’s start with the more ridiculous of these two questions. What is God?
To me, God is what you believe in when you think about who you are, and you think about that you are thinking about who you are, and it seems so real and you feel so special, that you can’t believe that there is no meaning or purpose to it.
That is my whole answer to what God is. You may not think it is that simple. You may think, I have that feeling too, but I can’t believe ______________ .
So don’t, don’t get all tied up in mental pictures of some guy in the clouds, things people have done with the idea of God, and teachings you don’t agree with. Our human need for rules, pictures, and complete understanding of something is only damaging when faced with something we can’t understand, so don’t try and understand.
I think that all of the religions that have ever existed probably started with the idea that human beings are something special then, as people tried to understand what God was, the idea grew. Soon people were bowing to gold statues or the moon and coming up with rituals and creating all sorts of ideas of God.
All I know is that there is such a thing as me, and that me needs a purpose, and that purpose is God. I hope that people can understand what I am getting at, because that is all I have for explaining what I think of God.
So if God gives you purpose, what does it means to love God?
To be honest, I haven’t actually put a lot of thought into this question until right now. Even though I grew up in a Christian household and obsessed over the meaning of life since I was young, somehow it only hit me recently that this is a super important thing to understand.
I believed in God, but for some reason I always skimmed over the idea of loving God.
What hit me the most when I first had the thought about loving God was that it would mean that I would be overwhelmingly thankful everyday for existing. In a way, my first thought was that to love God means loving life, which I am certainly happy to try and do!
Next I thought about the people that I love, which gave me some more clues. I figure I should be willing to do anything for God, that I should trust that God always has the best intentions for me, and that I should desperately want to be the best I can be to make God proud of me.
When I put it all together it seems like loving God with all of my heart should have a very positive impact on my life. To love God means that you are thankful for your life and at peace with who you are. It means that you don’t have to be afraid of where life is going, and that you will work everyday to be successful and make the world a better place.
(side note : I realize that I used the word God a lot. I am not trying to brainwash you, I just don’t like the idea of calling God Him or Her because I think the idea of God having a gender is misleading and wrong, however, I can’t bring myself to call God It, so until I figure out what to call God I will be calling God God a lot.)
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