Rev Up Your Will

That's my friendly advice. I believe it's a basic skill we all have to learn, and a very relevant one at that, given our present circumstances, whether in the personal or social level.

If problems, concerns, difficulties seem to drown you, you always have a way of tackling them effectively. Just rev up your will—to face them boldly and move on no matter what.

When temptations come, when human weaknesses drag you down, when mistakes seem to tear you apart, again just rev up your will, and you will have a way of saying no to temptations, of bearing the weaknesses, and of confidently facing the consequences of mistakes.

When you have to enter into a commitment, and when you feel weary to be
faithful to such commitment, rev your will up. You can without fear enter into such a commitment and cheerfully meet the requirements of fidelity.

Our will is a great weapon in our armory, a real treasure in our endowment. Together with our intellect, it is our chief spiritual faculty that enables us to transcend our human, earthly and material-bound condition.

With it, we can liberate ourselves from the morally-blind impulses of our hormones and the complicated play of forces in our social and political environment.

With it, we can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic, to love or to hate, to be happy or sad. With it, we can choose good or evil, to go along the ways of virtue or of vice. We can keep ourselves hopeful or wallow in self-pity.

Oh, how important that we really take good care of our will! It is what allows us to be lifted up to the supernatural order, to the world of grace.

You might be suspecting that I'm raving mad over our will's power, or waxing lyrical for its tremendous beauty and potentials. But let's hear what the Christian faith tell us about it.

From the Compedium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, we have the following most enlightening point:

"Man is open above all to the infinite—God—because with his intellect and
will he raises himself above all the created order and above himself, he becomes independent from creatures, is free in relation to created things and tends towards total truth and the absolute good." (130)

The big problem we have at the moment is that many of us are not taking good care of our will. We just allow it to drift to anywhere the wind blows. It can be dominated by our human frailties, instead of ruled by the impulses of God.

Thus, we can see an abundance of cases of people who are stuck in immaturity, being gripped by the impulses of their hormones or easily fooled and lost in the maze of our social life.

Those who may be lucky because of their superior human endowments can succumb to pride, arrogance, sophistry, pedantry, malice, etc., if they fail to orient their will to its proper object and to feed it by its proper food—God's will.

Remember what St. Paul said:

"I have learned to be self-sufficing in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to live humbly and I know how to live in abundance. I have been schooled to every place and every condition, to be filled and to be hungry, to have abundance and to suffer want. I can do all things in him who strengthens me." (Phil 4,11-13)

Sometimes, I feel our life is a will-game. That's why we have to be good at it. We have to rev it up everyday, so that it starts and ends only with God.