Does God expect things from us? This is an interesting question. In the Old Testament we have the 12 Commandments which are things God requires of us- to be faithful, to not kill, lie, cheat, steal, etc. In fact all great religions of the world attempt to prescribe some sort of ethical moral choices. However, as ethical humanists will point out correctly, one does not have to be religious to have an ethical or moral approach to life and decision making.
In the New Testament Jesus says there is one commandment from God: To love your neighbor as yourself. It is implied that if we love in this way we will not kill, cheat, lie, steal....all of those things that the 12 commandments covered. Again all of the great religions of the world also call us to Love. So is this an interesting coincidence that all religions call us to love and to moral behavior? Or could it be that when prophets and mystics have listened deeply to the Holy One that they have been given similar answers in many different languages?
So there seems to be some answers available about what God requires of us as people in general. But what about as individuals? Many religions also talk about being "called by God" or "being lead" by God. The descriptions of being called or having a leading are remarkably similar across denominational descriptions. People describe hearing a voice or receiving a message, usually directing them to do some particular thing. Sometimes these are messages to serve The Divine in some very specific way and to potentially serve a whole grouping of people. However, sometimes these are very specific individual messages to call a friend (only to discover that this person was in some dire situation), to stay home and not go out (later avoiding a danger), to speak to a certain person (only to discover a job offer), etc. There are also stories of people being lead to certain actions by God with no clear reason that ever becomes apparent why.
A personal example for me would be finding a series of little spiritual nudges to leave the social service agency where I worked as a counselor for 7 years and go into private practice. At the time I was a single parent and the idea of giving up a secure paycheck and benefits for the relative insecurity and unknown terrain, seemed like insanity itself. I however asked for a "clearness committee" - a concept from Quakerism where a few other people meet with you in consideration of critical life decisions. The committee meets in prayerful listening, seeking to confirm or to question that which the person feels lead to. Quakers, who practice a very experiential form of faithfulness designed this process as a safe guard against its members mistaking their own ego, or madness, or random thinking as a leading. Quakerism suggests that when a leading is true that it will have certain characteristics: it will be moral, it will persist over time, the "way will open" (meaning things will fairly easily line up to facilitate forward progress.), there will come a feeling of peace to follow it, etc.
My clearness committee confirmed that it did seem to be a leading and that as scary as it seemed it was still the right path. Feeling like I was jumping off a cliff and clinging to the quote: "When a woman leaps she either finds her wings or crashes to the ground." I turned in my resignation. In the year that followed, it was rough, up and down, including a national downturn in the economy. And yet within a year I was making the same amount I had been making in the agency in less time. Also, I watched the agency I had worked at downsize and lay people off and realized that in the pattern of how they did the layoffs that I would have been layed off. And in fact as I stayed in faithfulness other spiritual lessons were offered to me in my practice.
In a previous post I have looked at the issue of whether we have free will and how that intersects with the Holy Author. So the issue of leadings is an interesting place of intersection of the issue of free will. Everything I have seen written about leadings and certainly my own experience with them suggests that we have completely free will, there is no “have to” about leadings. It is I think like a friend, we may want for them a certain outcome, we may hope for them to act in a certain way, but we can’t make them and we would not see it as appropriate to make them. However, I don’t think life is equally good if we ignore leadings. For one thing we essentially refuse to enter our relationship with God. But as my example indicates faithfulness was in my own best interest. My life would have gone, perhaps we could argue equally well after I would have been laid off and found another job. But it does seem that when we listen and our faithful there is a sort of convergence of God’s will and ours for a goodness.
Some Christians suggest that when we are not faithful God will punish us. I find no examples in my life where I feel God punished anyone, and it indeed seems incompatible with a picture of a loving God. It seems to me that the idea of a punishing God dips into the pool I have previously addressed of our carrying our experience with our parents into how we conceptualize God. If we had punitive parents with harsh punishments we may fear that to not “Obey” God will bring the same kind of punishment. But it seems to me that in interpreting things as punishment we get into the same problem as testing a leading. Can one person know there leading to be true and not of their own mind? Can one person correctly interpret something as a punishment? I think that also would have to be tested against a prayerful body.
I feel instead that a Loving Parent, wants for us our growth, our happiness and a greater Goodness all around us.
