In our gospel for today, Jesus says, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother.” By and large and generally speaking, we may think we want to do the will of God, or maybe even that we are doing the will of God right now. Sometimes, though, when we stop to think about it, we may realize that we seldom, or maybe never, ask the Holy One about what God’s will for our lives really is. Perhaps that is because we are somewhat afraid that God will want us to become a missionary in some dreadful place, or maybe something even worse that we are totally unprepared for. Actually, we have nothing to fear. When we offer ourselves up into the hands of God, we can trust that we will be prepared for whatever comes our way.

Of course, it would be nice if we could look up and see a billboard with our name on it, announcing God’s will for us in big letters. That would make it easy for us to accept—or reject. I suspect, however, that God’s will is not such a big mystery, that God’s will for us, each of us and all of us, is in fact the same—that we become the imago dei we were created to be, that we become transformed by Love from the image of God that we have allowed to be marred first one way and then another, into the likeness of Christ, “a new creation,” as the apostle Paul puts it, where ”everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.” (II Cor.5:17) As we grow “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph.4:13b), “as we move from slavery to freedom, from fear to boldness, from death to life, from darkness to light, from selfishness to generous love, in the pattern of the living Lord Jesus and as guided by the Holy Spirit,” (Luke Timothy Johnson: The Creed, p.278), we discover just how much we are changed. We are often surprised to find more and more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control (the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives as a testimony of God’s will for us) than we have ever experienced, and we know it is not our doing. It seems then that doing God’s will is being receptive to God’s transforming grace and living it out in the circumstances of our lives. And so may we pray: “O Lord, my God, your will is holy, loving, and wise. Let your will be done in me, for me, through me, in spite of me; for the sake of him whose greatest joy was to do your will, even Jesus Christ our Lord.” George Appleton (1902-1993)