God's Best

The other day I was talking with a mentor of mine and he used the phrase "God's best". He was specifically saying that a choice he made was fine but didn't feel like God's best. I had never really heard the term but I am coming to really like it. For me it is not a term of condemnation but a recognition that there is a better way.

So often we don't have the clarity or the courage to admit that something we are doing may not be "God's best" for us. It doesn't mean that we are sinning, it means that there may be a better way. For me there is a real freedom to seeing a better way, grounded in God's grace.

I wish that more people would have this sense of God's best in the world and in our lives. We need to learn to live in the tension even though we don't want to live in the tension. We want what we want now and we want whatever we are doing to be okay. The modern folk religion is that everything is okay as long as nobody is hurt. This dumbs us down and lowers the expectations when in many cases they should be raised.

There is often a better way and God calls us into this better way. Our belovedness is not dependent on living that better way but as God's beloved he desires for us to have life in its fullness, in other words "His best".

Divine Branding

There is a time when the fire of Divine Love, that is Christ's Love brands our hearts. It leaves an indelible mark on our soul, like a brand or tattoo. We are never the same after it, the experience lingers in our soul's memory and sets a course or direction for our lives. We can try to ignore our branding, if it is minor or so we think. We can cover it up with business, good intentions, fun activities.


It will always be there and we should not fear the place it is calling us to. For it is not the mark calling us, it is Christ calling us deeper into his presence which is another way of saying deep into his love. For his love and his presence are bound, one can't be in his presence without being loved. Again, we can ignore love and that may lead to suffering in the lover but it doesn't change the love. Christ always calls into deepening our sense of belovedness, deeper and deeper still until we can't exist without our heart beating to the rhythm of his love for us.

Spiritual practice deepens our sense of belovedness, in Jim Smith's words it changes our God story and put new narratives in place. When we learn to live from those new narratives it means that our character has changed, it is more in line with Christ's. We receive greater freedom and our bondage is released.

Some thoughts

I've been listening to Therese of Avila's Interior Castle (it is a masterful work on prayer). One of the things that struck me was how easily she moves into prayer. She will be discussing a particular issue and then a few sentences later she is praising Christ or imploring him to make us experience what she is writing about.

This helps me understand how saturated she was in the Divine Life. She had our Lord constantly in mind and was aware of his presence in all things and had this deep and profound desire to please and serve him. It reminds me of Paul's letters where he calls himself slave of Christ. She calls Jesus, His Majesty.

She also lifts up the many ways we can grow slack in our prayer and let the Evil One distract us and keep us from growing deeper or, in her language, going into the next mansion. I know that it is easy to move away from our center and calling. There are so many good things to get distracted with. I find her insistence on prayer as primary in life to be so helpful.