by Ernest O'Neill
One of the most satisfying moments in life is when you sit across the room from someone you respect and you know that you both feel exactly the same about something. This is especially restful when you not only feel the same but want the same thing. If you know each other well then you can tell whether the other person wants what you want or is just trying to please you. You also know whether they want it for the same reasons as you or whether they want it just because it seems reasonable.
Why is it so difficult for two people to want the same thing ? Because free will enables us to choose just what we want to choose. And integrity of personality requires that we do this from motives that are honest and real.
Day after day, people agree superficially in order to get practical jobs done. Moment by moment, men and women agree outwardly because of authority, fear, or admiration. But everyone is different - brought up by different mothers, attending different schools, experiencing different sorrows and successes. We all bring different views and attitudes to every situation, so it's difficult for more than three people to honestly want the same thing for the same reasons and from the same motives. Usually, the agreement is superficial and expedient rather than internal and principled.
Yet this is the purpose of life ! This is why the Creator made us. He made us "in his image" and this meant giving us free wills like His own. Our quest is to come into agreement with Him. You can see that the inventor of a microchip for a computer knows best how that chip will work. He knows its potential and can tell how that can be fulfilled.
It's the same with our maker. He knows what he put in you. He knows why He made you the way He did. He knows how His Son Christ will bring His world into order through your life. But this can happen only if you come into oneness with His will in every detail of your life. God will do nothing against his own will, but he will do nothing apart from our wills.
Human beings know these things, but cannot face the inner integrity that is required to enter complete agreement with the Creator, so we have invented all kinds of partial or superficial agreement. So today, people talk about "obeying God", identifying oneself with God's purposes, and becoming a disciple. We join Bible studies, attend conferences, enter monastic orders, study principles of godliness, do what our religious peers do, try to improve our personal behavior, endeavour to pursue internal spiritual progress, and make God's will the ruling passion of our lives.
But we do not desire what God desires from deep-down within us. Sometimes we feel some of his love for others; sometimes we are surprised that we seem to feel the same affection as God, but often we are aware that we do not feel at all what He seems to feel. This is what our Maker is interested in. He knows we can treat Him as a god - as someone outside ourselves - whom we try to please. But He put us here on earth for seventy years so that we could, by the choice of our own wills, come into absolute oneness with Him IN OUR HEARTS.
This is the remarkable function of our intuition. In this deep area of our human spirits we sense whether we are in absolute oneness with Our Creator or not. Intuition (from the Latin verb meaning "to see within") reveals what we really want - what we truly desire. God is waiting for us to want what He wants - to desire what He desires. We know we are beginning to mature when our desires are the same as His - all the time. When we want to speak what Christ's Spirit within us is speaking, then we are beginning to understand God's heart. Jesus said: "I have not called you servants because a servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends." Our maker wants us to be his bosom friends, his dear children - bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. He wants us to love him and feel what he feels; he wants us to think what he thinks and respond as he responds. What does your intuition urge? Note that. Then transact business with your maker.