The One Needful Thing

The Lord's Prayer in Luke starts with "Thy will be done."  Maybe the other accounts do as well, but this struck me. Some of our family members end with "thy will be done" or include it in the middle of a prayer after asking for something that could be beneficial or harmful (weather, healing).  But to put it at the beginning of the prayer, before you have even asked anything?  Hmmmmm....

So this morning, as I prayed, I inserted that phrase first and really thought about it.  What is the Father's will for my life today?   All of a sudden a few questions that have been floating around in my mind came together.

That is the one needful thing!  Not to help my children come to know God, learn more, to serve my neighbor...although those are all part of it.  The one needful thing that Christ was suggesting...could it be to come to know God?  I mean, if we know Him, really know Him, we will know what He would do.

That kind of connection is when you attain that oneness that is between the Father and the Son.  That kind of knowledge is the one necessary as found in John 17:3: This is life eternal that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.  How do we come to know someone?  Well, by studying about them and then by doing what they would do!  It is that phrase "WWJD" that we saw on all the necklaces and t-shirts a few years ago: What would Jesus do? because Jesus is the one that we (as humanity on this earth) saw as the living embodiment of what God would have done if He were walking the earth.

Elder Holland has a great talk about that, the "Grandeur of God," where he talks about how one of the missions of Christ was to come down and show us how God would act and how God would love and how God would forgive if we could see Him.

To know God enough to know what He would do and then to do it?  Wow.  That is a whole new question and phrase of prayer.  That automatically includes all the best things: loving family, forgiving, serving...even cleaning up the house, painting and doing family history and making gifts!  God does all of these things in one sense or another.  The key is knowing when is the right time to do it...the inspired, non-anxious way (although we are to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, but then maybe that kind of anxious doesn't include our modern plague of anxiety?).  Anyway...it left me thinking and I would welcome any thoughts or insights others may have, as always :).