Meditate | Receiving Life

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. You could write for Meditate, too! Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor.

“[6] We are not born human, we become human. The form in which we are born is that of an organism for receiving life from God, for the purpose of being an entity into which God can bring all that is good and, through union with him, make that entity blissfully happy forever…[8] They saw themselves as nothing more than vessels to receive life from God…with all their heart and soul…[9] If we attribute all the goodness related to goodwill, and all the truth related to faith, to the Lord and none of it to ourselves, we are human and we become angels of heaven” (True Christianity 692).

How can we be blissfully happy forever? What does it look like to attribute all goodness and truth to the Lord on a daily basis? In one way, I sense it as a lot of letting go and trusting that the Lord’s work and will are being done through whatever is manifesting in my life.

The only way it is possible to be blissfully happy forever is if what it takes to be blissfully happy becomes a daily thing, a daily reality we can connect to—the reality of the Lord’s presence, care, and life in us, as us. This passage brings me to thoughts about identity. Usually, or so often I think of my dreams for my life as something I need to try to get the Lord to make a reality, but if I am fully or always a vessel for receiving life from the Lord then they aren’t my dreams—they are the Lord’s implanted in me for his work and my happiness. So I don’t need to fear whether they will happen or not. If I instead focus on being a vessel for the Lord in my daily life, then the Lord—all goodness and all truth—will bring into being that which is meant to be. It seems too good to be true, but at the same time I have an inner resonance I feel I can trust with the idea that the Lord really is good and wants me to be blissfully happy forever. So I can live one day at a time, consulting the Lord in his Word and in my heart and commit to live his truth, his will in life and not from my lower-self concern.

Chelsea Rose Odhner

Chelsea is wife to a PhD candidate. In addition to mothering her two young children round the clock, she is an assistant editor for New Church Connection and an editor and writer for New Church Perspective.