May you always be joyful in your union with the Lord. I say it again: rejoice!
Show a gentle attitude toward everyone. The Lord is coming soon. Don’t worry about anything, but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking him with a thankful heart. And God’s peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 4:4-7) Good News Translation
We (that’s me and the Holy spirit) have communion with God through the Holy spirit. We’re in, essentially, a permanent state of prayer. The reason why we do this is to understand and experience joy. True joy.
The moments in which we experience joy may be hard to come by, fleeting and above all else, unpredictable. What if we could deduce a process which produces joy in a more predictable manner? That’s all kinds of recreation. But the true joy is knowing that God is who He says He is, He can do what He claims that He can do, and He’s going to do what He said He was going to do.
You know the exquisite ping of excitement that you get when you swing and hit a golf ball, you sense that good really solid connection with the ball and you watch it go sailing off in the right direction and get to the target? There’s exquisite joy in completing a successful golf shot. We’re going to use this as an opportunity to have fellowship with the Lord and experience that joy together, it’s going to be a shared thing. God’s going to be experiencing the joy that we have.
We were created to have fellowship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For some people this develops when life is over and they pass into eternity, sometimes tragically. For many of us fellowship with God is an ever present reality. We share our lives with Him in a narrative dialogue in our minds. We experience, and actively engage in, prayer and meditation wherever we may be and whatever we may be doing. It may look like we’re talking to ourselves, but we’re mouthing out the narrative, hopefully in a way where not too many people notice.
But God’s even more blessed than that because he wants us to have joy, and he’s going to enable us to experience joy in a way that we haven’t done before: if we acknowledge Him in all things.
However, it’s easy to be distracted by the activities of life and forget all about God for a period of time. That’s why it’s always a good idea to set aside time for just prayer and meditation, and when we don’t have any other activity. A logical combination of these two states is to have an activity which enhances our fellowship with God, through prayer and meditation, while we’re appreciating the beauty of creation.
We can have fellowship with God, which begins with salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and acknowledge Him as the source of all life, controlling the elemental forces of nature, in an activity where we experience the beauty of nature in community with other people who may be similarly inclined.
Let’s play golf.
Matty's Paradigm 