The Spiritual Quest - Part 1

I have great news for you – God is loose! From humankind’s first spiritual yearnings and awareness that there is a great, organizing principle to the universe that we call God, we’ve tried to put this Ultimate Being into a box that can be identified, comprehended and bent to our will.

We’ve organized vast numbers of religions around God, each slightly different from the others, and then rushed to battle over the differences. We fight because the box into which one group wanted to put God is bigger or smaller or differently shaped than the box into which another group wanted to confine God.

Because of those differences, some argue that any group other than their own does not worship the same God as they do. As a Christian, I firmly believe there is only one God.

I also know people understand God differently. Most of the world does not understand God as He revealed Himself through Jesus. They don’t comprehend God as three Persons in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But if they yearn for, seek and bow down to God, they are humbling themselves as the created before the Creator.

My act of faith is that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God and that His death on the cross and Resurrection from the dead is a historical fact and a spiritual truth. I have no idea why God planned it that way.

I believe that God loves us and has gone to the extraordinary measure of taking on human form so that we can actually relate to God despite our very limited human capacity – and that His will is that all be saved.

Here’s the thing: There are people recognized as spiritual human beings, even by those who would not describe themselves as spiritual. The Pope, by his election by a conclave of the College of Cardinals, is recognized as an international spiritual leader. The Dalai Lama is recognized as a spiritual human being because of the equanimity and pervasive personal peace that emanates from him. Billy Graham is a spiritual person in the traditional Christian sense and is extraordinarily charismatic.

Humans know we are more than our frail flesh. We have in common an urgency to be a part of something bigger, to be a part of the great, vast Whole. We’re aware of a spiritual self that yearns for God in whom we can find meaning.

The term “spirit” refers to the “animating or vital principle” in humans and animals. It comes from the Latin word spiritus – soul, courage, vigor, breath.

If you have no regard for your spiritual life, or for that of your family and friends, how can you as a leader nurture that “vital, animating principle” in others?