One "right" path?

[Anne Robertson]

Lifting from a point in the hell discussion made by merimes:

"So many of us struggle to be successful, and so many do not find happiness. What if being here is about finding the correct path God has set before us - until we find it we are not completely happy."

I don't think there is one correct path that God has set for each of us. I think there is one basic direction, but not one path per person for getting there. One of the best books I know of on this topic is Leslie Wetherhead's The Will of God. An example from that (with some room for faulty memory) is a parent watching a child play in the backyard. As long as the parent has agreed that the child is free to play (rather than doing homework, for example), the child has freedom to pick the swings or the sandbox or whatever else strikes his/her fancy. The will of the parent is that the child have fun and only a neurotic parent insists on micromanaging that fun by saying exactly how a child is allowed to do that.

Although the parent metaphor for God has its limits, it is instructive in many cases, and I think this is one of them. My spiritual and emotional growth would be stunted if I never learned to make choices. We start with relatively easy choices...the bad vs. the good. While the bad may be tempting, we learn after enough mistakes that the consequences of choosing the bad are not worth it. But, as we grow, we enter into a harder realm. By adulthood, the truly difficult choices are between options that are either equally good or equally bad. Which of these great career paths should I follow? Do I pay the light bill or the water bill?

Anyway, I see the Bible as presenting parameters for faithful living...love God, love your neighbor, be a responsible steward of the earth and all that is in it. But while God shows us examples of what that looks like, I think we are completely free to figure out how to shape our lives within that framework. I think we're also free to reject the framework entirely and accept the consequences.

[J. Allan Taylor]

I broadly agree with Anne........and I think that the parent metaphor, whilst sometimes limited, is often as good as we can get in thinking about our relationship with God. I wonder if the metaphor of the Satnav is of any value. I've just been given a Satnav by my children and it tells me the way to go from A to B but if I deviate for whatever reason from its instructions then it reconfigures and still gets me to my destination by a slightly different route! I don't think that there can be one, and one only, 'right ' path

Glad to read your reference to Leslie Weatherhead, Anne. In the middle years of the last century he was one of the three great figures of British Methodism......the other two being W.E.Sangster and Donald Soper. It was said of these three: Sangster loves God, Weatherhead loves people and Soper loves an argument! Indeed I think that Soper himself admitted that he was one of the founding members of 'The Fellowship of Controversy.'

[William (Bill) Mayor]

Anne,

I would say that you are in large part correct, but your example of the difficult choices in adulthood seem to me to be choices between which of two wrong paths that flawed human society forces on me do I chose. We must make the choice about which bill to pay, or which career path to follow, but these are not the choices God is concerned with. Rather God is concerned with the choice between am I self-centerd or other-centered. Do I place myself ahead of all others, which of necessity includes God, or do I place myself subject to all others, including God. If I am subject to God, I must, by necessity, be subject also to others. If I am not subject to others, I cannot be subject to God.

This is the simple message of the question of the two greatest commandments. If I follow one of them, I must follow both. If I ignore one, I will be forced to ignore the other also. There are only two paths, and in choosing which of these two paths we follow is our free will. That both paths have numerous minor variations is merely obscurring the truth. The same two choice are present in religion, pantheism or monotheism; as well as quantum theory, MultiWorld Interpretation (MWI) or the Copenhagen Convention (CC), which incidentally I would argue is the only true Christian understanding, but that is probably a whole separate topic.