What does God think of us? I wonder if that question occurs to us often enough.
It is a very fundamental question based in an acknowledgment of the reality of this life and this world that has been entrusted to us. That reality is that God is the author of all the world and all that we are.
To ask what God thinks of us is to accept that God has a plan for the world and for you and me. To ask what God thinks of us is to ask how we are fulfilling God’s plan written in our hearts and in nature itself.
God alone, of course, judges the depths of our souls. Ultimately our conscience and the judgment of how we are living is open to Him alone. Still, we don’t have to guess about God’s plan or what is pleasing to Him.
Christ came into the world to reveal to us what it is that God wants. And He established His Church, endowing it with His Holy Spirit to overcome even her human flaws and sins, so that the Church would be a sure guide for us through all the ages. We can have confidence then that we can know what God wants for all men and women.
We begin, then, by recognizing that God wants us, and every person, to know Him and to love Him as He truly is. Each of us has been made for one single purpose, to be with God for eternal life. Everything that we do or say or avoid in this world is in service to that one goal. The price of that infinite happiness, however, is that we have to freely choose God over everything else.
How often that basic reality gets lost in our lives. With so much materialism, so many distractions and “busyness” in our lives, it is easy to reduce God to one among many goals or activities of life. How easily God can become just a quick and pious thought, here and then gone, instead of the deepest of our loves and our motivations.
More fundamentally, we must love God by how we live our lives. That means that we have obligations of moral conduct that are not simply ours to create or ignore.
Sure, most people will agree that “thou shalt not kill.” However, history has plenty of examples of even that commandment being broken on a limited or a grand scale when human sinfulness breaks out.
But what of the other moral obligations? Obligations like respecting all facets of the lives of others, caring for the poor, keeping our marriages faithful and sacred by the correct use of sexuality or not acquiring excess goods beyond our needs? How we meet these obligations are direct indicators of the place of God in our lives.
Of course, there is a still greater danger. It is not just that God is given a reduced place in our lives. Rather, we are moving toward God being totally excluded, especially in public life.
We are being told not to speak His name publicly so as not to offend. We are increasingly not being allowed to appeal to our right and freedom of conscience that connects us to God because that might limit some of the other values that society has come to judge as important. If we wish to pray, we may gather to do so privately, but not in public.
What results is human nature, separated from its Maker and from its final goal. No wonder then that as God gets pushed aside in our thoughts and plans, other lesser values must fill the void. Think of all of the time and money that is put into following sports or celebrities.
Even Pope Francis was recently criticized for noting that among the top five expenses statistically are pets and cosmetics. His point was that the use of money is a marker of values. In a time of widespread poverty and need and a growing reluctance of couples to marry and have children, society is turning to exaggerations in animals and avoiding the signs of aging.
To ask what God thinks of us is to ask a deep question about ourselves. It is ultimately to ask what will make us happy, truly and eternally happy?
The good news is that God wants us to ask that question. God gives us the answer in our Catholic faith and in the person of Jesus. If we have gotten off track, He is always willing to take us back, to help us in a life of conversion.
But the first step is to honestly ask yourself, what does God think of me?