The petition for God’s will challenges and liberates us.  It challenges us because sometimes God’s will does not line up with our will.  This can even be painful because the things we desire can be good, yet for one reason or another they do not line up with God’s will.  The petition can be liberating, because when we surrender control to God, we are able to lift the burdens of life off of our shoulders.  In order to fully appreciate and unite to God’s will, we must understand what God wills for us in our lives?

The primary will of God for us is eternal life.  Eternal life is us uniting with our God in heaven.  God created us not for this world, but for the world to come.  With this in mind, we can assume that everything God does or does not do for us in our lives focuses on this journey towards heaven.  In the moment, we often do not understand the purpose, because things do not always go our way and we are even left wondering how can this be part of God and good?  God’s goal is to save everyone, and in order to do that, God constantly has to look at the overall picture and not just individual moments.  Can we trust that everything happens for a reason and God is building us towards eternal life?

The will of God is that we keep His commandments.  The Commandments at times may seem like a list of rules and burdens that limit our freedom, but in actuality, they are an expression of God’s will.  Everything in the Commandments communicates to us who God is and the virtues that make God.  It calls us to live a certain way; He is looking to call us out of a lifestyle in which we determine what we want to do and discover what God wants us to do.  Similar to a doctor who wants to aid the health of a person by putting them on a diet, God puts us on a spiritual diet of do’s and don’ts to make us healthy. 

Finally, God’s will is to restore the original dignity of man.  When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree in the Garden, our creation in the image of God was damaged.  The dignity of our creation was tainted by sin.  God’s will is to be healed and restored from sin and find that original dignity again.  We often think that sin is part of being human, and though we all sin, it is not part of who we are.  We are not meant to be sinners, thus God seeks to aid us in overcoming sin.  This is a painful process, with the pinnacle being the Cross.  All that God does seeks to purge the sin from our souls and restore us to Himself. 

When things happen to us in our lives or maybe don’t happen, we must keep in mind these three things to understand why God would will it.  Eternal life, following Commandments, and restoring dignity are key to understanding God’s interaction with us in our lives.  His goal is not to make our lives comfortable here on earth and give us everything our hearts desire.  It is not even to make us fully happy here on earth.  God’s goal is to get us to heaven.  Let us pray that we may have the grace to trust God and surrender our will to His even in the tough moments of our lives.