God Comes to Us Disguised as our Life

God Comes to Us Disguised as our Life

By David Benner

If we fail to be open to the flow of our life and the gifts it brings us, we cannot be genuinely open to God. If we are open to our life, God will introduce into it the grace that we need to grow up into the fullness of our true self-in-Christ. Often this grace will come in the form of experiences that we might not have ever chosen but which hold the possibility of helping us awaken. But grace comes most regularly in the form of the people in our life whom we normally do not notice but who bring to us the most precious gift of God---the gift of our becoming.

This posture of openness in faith reflects the essence of prayer. Prayer is openness to God in faith. It is allowing the life of God to flow into and through us. This is the faith that we receive as a gift when we turn in openness and trust to God. Once we begin to trust that our life comes to us as a gift from God, we are able to respond to it with a yes of basic acceptance and openness.

Dag Hammarskjold describes the way in which saying yes can transform the spirit: “I don’t know who or what put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even know remember answering. But at some moment I did answer yes to someone or something. And from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender had a goal. Saying yes to life does not mean that you must pretend to like everything that life brings you. It simply means that you receive it with openness of heart and mind, an openness that allows you to see yourself, your life, and the world with new eyes and to respond to it out of a bigger heart. This is faith, and such faith opens us in hospitality to the Spirit of God, who is already present with us and who is the source of all becoming.