Day by Day Finding God’s Goodness

With the weight of the past few years, do you feel you’ve been living the good life? How would you like to spend a few minutes each day cultivating a life worth living. Living the good life is the journey to find the divine within. It’s not so much looking outside ourselves but inviting our Creator to reveal the goodness present in the day-to-day moments of our life. Too often we are hurried, unconscious or unaware of the gifts of peace, hope and joy that are ours for the taking if only we seek the things that feed our soul such as our relationship with God. The whole of the Bible is about how we can restore and build this relationship with the Divine. God, who is always good, constantly seeks us and is ever present. It is we who turn away, following our own agenda and trying to fill a God-size hole with things other than grace and divine love.

Would you like to take concrete steps this year finding the deeper meaning of life, the very shape of human happiness? How is God calling you to trust that life, despite your circumstances is good? And how are you called to bring goodness into the world?

This year the Smitten With Goodness Daily Meditations will center around the theme Day by Day Finding God’s Goodness where we aim to grow in awareness of God’s presence in our life. A bit of goodness you can chew on throughout your day.

Spending just five minutes each day in prayer, meditation, reflection on God’s word and the examples of the saints, we can awaken our hearts to this goodness.

We start savoring the gifts of directing our will and our desires toward good. Our souls become satisfied with nourishment beyond what our culture provides. We seek to live rightly with the habits, disposition and behaviors that enable us to empower and enliven our soul. We learn to live the good life of simplicity, in truth and beauty, falling into our relationship with God and living in the natural flow.

Living a life of virtue is something tangible that we can do to start this journey. That along with a healthy sense of curiosity.

As we study the good life of virtue of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance and align them with what we are called to love, we start living as God designed us to be – God’s divine gift to the world. We bear the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. Think about this, a tree that is broken or diseased does not bear good fruit because it is not whole and healthy, it is unable to operate wholly with integrity. It is the same for us. This process of transformation happens with prayer, self-doubt, study and conversation leading to what the church calls holiness, what Americans call freedom, and psychology calls wholeness.

Day by Day Finding God’s Goodness will take a page out of St. Bonaventure’s (following St. Augustine’s) playbook where four things must be loved because of their intrinsic value to live in the right order:  Loving God, who I am in God, my neighbor in God, and my body in God. God wants us to live a good life. He wants us to rest in His goodness, lean on His plan for us, and trust He has it all under His control. But in our humanity, it is hard. We want to do things our way and hang onto the illusion of control rather than living in humility, trust, and surrender. As we align ourselves with God’s unique plan for us, everything falls into place and we begin to fall upward, even as we face the challenges of living on this side of heaven.

Are you ready to claim and embrace the idea of God’s goodness and live your life through this lens? Could the answer to our world’s most complex problems be as simple as living in the divine peace, joy, and love God placed within us? Could salvation simply be the willingness to remain in a loving relationship with all of creation? We will explore these questions and more Day by Day Finding God’s Goodness.

Over the next twelve months, we will see how living in right order invites us to experience God’s presence in ourselves and in each other. We will spend each quarter working our way through the four cardinal virtues and see what happens when they are infused by grace. The time you spend daily contemplating God’s goodness will encourage you to live more deeply, aware of the divine presence within you, loving and in relationship with the Holy Trinity.

God is not a concept or a description but a relationship itself.

When we see through this lens, we tap into the source of life, and participate in the flow of grace. I hope these meditations will help deepen your prayer practice, provide food for thought, and call you to be smitten with goodness!

Thank you for being a part of a community that chooses to seek and live in God’s goodness.

Cynthia