Questions to Ponder

I brainstormed, pondered, and then answered these questions over several months back in 2009 (see archives, if you wish).  Re-visiting these questions periodically helps me to witness my growth, evolving wisdom, and progress toward peace.  Enjoy the experience of really thinking through life’s questions!  I sure have.

1. What would make this a great year for you?  What would you like to spend more time doing?  What would you like to spend less time doing?

2.  What has God taught you recently?

3.  What are your natural, or God-given, gifts?  Have you been able to focus on your gift(s) and find a passion in life?

4.  What hinders you?

5.  What is your highest (even quixotic) vision of yourself?

6.   What lessons does God have to keep re-teaching you?  (For example, if you go back and re-read your journal, do you see repeated themes of inspiration?)

7. Assume for a minute that your life’s purpose is to “do good”–what is your favorite way to “do good”?

8. If you knew you were to die in 3 days, what would be your priorities between now and then? (What would you not want to leave undone?)

9.  Is life a test?  If so, what is the content of the test?

10.  What has experience taught you?

11.  If God were perfectly happy to have you believe what you wanted to believe about him, what would you want to believe?  What is your grandest vision of the God you could love with all your heart?

12.  If a child you were caring for ignored your warnings and foolishly ran, fell, and skinned his knees, would you be mad at him?  Would his carelessness irritate you?  Inconvenience you?  Think about it and pay careful attention to your feelings about it.  Your response is indicative of your most pervasive thought about God.  Ask yourself, “What does God think of me when I fall?”

13.  Why is God having you spend mortality behind a “veil of forgetfulness”?  What wonderful purpose is there to his reticence (quietness), in your opinion?

14.  Whom do you trust to teach you about God?   Why do you trust them?

15.  What would you do if you were a member of a musical band who, after several years of individual effort contributed toward the collaborated end product—an album of songs unsurpassed in beauty and musical ingenuity, found out that one of the band members had taken the album to his neck of the woods and started distributing copies without informing his fellow band members?  How would you respond?  Would your actions help or harm that band member?

16.  What is your greatest concern?  Turning it around as a statement of your greatest desire, how would it read?

17.  What would be your absolute favorite way of making a living?  What is one thing you could do this week to move in the direction of that dream?

18.  Do you ever lie?  Why do you?