Life’s journey is meant to provide us with all the various opportunities to put on the mind of Christ. It is my belief that God realized, when He created us, that He wanted to create beings in His image and likeness. Because of this He realized that we could only “freely” return His love if we had free will. Why? Because God, by His very essence, freely loves His creation. His love is unconditional. He can never withdraw His love for His creation because He created out of love. Therefore, He had to create various opportunities for us, who are created in His image and likeness, to freely return His love.

How did He accomplish this? By designing life in such a fashion that it would present a variety of situations to each human being that would provide opportunities for humans to learn how to freely return His love.

This we know to be true! Humans never learn anything unless they are challenged. If we are never challenged, we never learn. So, life has to provide us with positive and negative challenges so that we can learn how to make choices about responding to challenges.

So all of life’s challenges are good in so far as they provide us with opportunities to learn how to freely trust God, place our hope in God and unconditionally love Him. It is in this way that we freely return His love.

We humans tend, I think, “conditionally” love God and others. Most often we base our love on how we think others love us. We can use our experience with human love to verify this. Think about it. We tend to love others only when we are assured of their love for us. If we judge that someone doesn’t love us in the same way that we think we love them, we tend to withhold our love or withdraw our love. This, of course, is conditional love. It says, I will love others, even God, if I think they love me. Of course in the case of God, we think He only loves us when He does what we want or grants the things that we desire or think are good for us. We immediately think He doesn’t really love us if He doesn’t give us that for which we pray. Again, this is truly conditional love! What we are called to do is unconditionally love God and others.

How do we learn to do this? By first unconditionally loving other humans. This is only done by loving others regardless of how they treat us – it’s returning hatred with love and rejection with love.

Think about this!