God's Plan

God has a plan, a Personal Plan for each and every person born from the first one to the last one. Our dilemma is discerning what that plan is and how to integrate our own plans with God’s plan, how to align our wills with God’s Will, how to avoid acting contrary to His Will.

God’s plans are strategic and tactical.
His strategic plan concerns the universe, it’s creation and how it is sustained from the moment of its creation to its ultimate end.
His strategic plan also concerns every person living in that universe. It asserts that the universe exists solely for the sake of each and every person abiding in it. God has a collective plan for humanity and a personal plan for each and every individual person.

The collective plan is to ensure cooperation between all peoples, to ensure harmony, physical, social, political progress and the spiritual development on which that progress must depend. The collective plan is like a giant jig-saw with innumerable pieces that have to fit well to ensure the final optimal picture. Ill-fitting pieces can only distort it, cause disharmony, and interfere with the physical, social, political and spiritual progress and development required.

If everything was perfect, every person would think and act in accordance with God’s plan. With every person thinking and acting in accord with God’s personal plan for him, there would be perfect harmony between all persons, individually and collectively, there would be no wars, tyranny, hatred or evil and man would exist in happiness without anxiety, fear or apprehension.

However, because of God’s gift to man of free-will combined with the effects of the Fall from Grace of Adam, this is not the case. Because of man’s spiritual weakness derived from the Fall, his free-will and its exercise constantly and recurrently frustrate God’s Plan for man’s life on earth.
Christ’s teaching, direct during His life on earth and since then indirectly through His Church, shows us in a general way what His will for us consists of : that we should do all things according to His Will, that we should align our wills with His Will in all things.

The big problem, however, is ascertaining what God’s will is for us in the everyday events of our individual lives. How do we discern what God wants us to do in any particular instance?. How do we know what person is right for us to marry, what occupation, what job, is right for us?. How do we match our personal and social attributes with those of a considered spouse? How do we align our proposed occupation with our individual talents, our individual expertise, our individual endowments?

We may try to solve these problems on our own, using our personal experience, our personal intelligence, the experience and intelligence – advice - of others. Sad to say we seldom have recourse to the One who can best advise, the One who knows the future, the One who knows us and our talents, our endowments, our likes and dislikes, the One who without any doubt in the world can give us the optimal help and guidance needed.

Even among the devout, there tends to be something of the feeling that God doesn’t have time or interest in dealing with everybody’s daily problems. This is akin to the beliefs of the Deist who acknowledges that God did indeed create the world but that after He created it, He ignores it and leaves it and its people to fend for themselves.
God’s answer to the Deist is provided by Jesus who said ‘Seek you first the Kingdom of God and its justice and all these other things (life’s daily concerns) will be added unto you’ and ‘Consider the birds : they neither sow or reap or gather into barns and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than they’?.

If we are to be able to ask God for guidance in particular problems and decisions, we must be in communication with Him, we must be open to His inner voice, we must allow Him access to our soul - to our intellect and to our will. This can only be possible if we are in the ‘state of grace’, in a state of friendship with Him : we cannot be in communion with God if we are in a state of enmity with Him because of unconfessed, unrepentant mortal sin.

When we are ‘in grace’, we can confidently look to God for real guidance and support in response to our prayers, we can safely assume that whatever decision we make, whatever course we take, will be in accordance with His will for us, in accordance with His personal plan for us. We may encounter frustrations and doubts, and even an apparent lack of response to our call for help. In all cases we must have faith and trust that God will hear us, that He is hearing us, as without this faith and this trust, God may turn away from us. In the boat when the storm came suddenly He said ‘Why are you fearful, Oh you of little faith?’. At least once, before performing a miracle, Jesus asked if the person believed that He could do it.

The two greatest decisions we are faced with in life involve the decisions of whether and who to marry, and what occupation, what job, to pursue.
In both instances our decisions should be based on sound knowledge, information and good advice from those in a position to give it. It must also and especially follow guidance from God to ensure that the course taken is in accordance with His Personal Plan for us.
If we can be sure of that we can proceed with complete confidence in the soundness of the decision and look forward to a happy future.
This guidance from God is obtained by focused prayer and prayer’s best form is in a properly observed Mass and Communion, the Rosary and the Chaplet.