Help Aleteia continue its mission by making a tax-deductible donation. In this way, Aleteia's future will be yours as well.
*Your donation is tax deductible!
Do you ever think about why God created you? Did God create you for his own benefit?
Or did God create you out of the abundance of his love?
God certainly didn't have to create us, as he is infinitely perfect and has no need of us to fulfill an empty void.
Yet, God created us, giving us both body and soul so that we may love him in return.
Gratitude to God
St. Francis de Sales begins his meditations in the Introduction to the Devout Life meditating on the great love and mercy of God for creating us:
Consider that but a few years since you were not born into the world, and your soul was as yet non-existent. Where wert thou then, O my soul? the world was already old, and yet of thee there was no sign.
God brought you out of this nothingness, in order to make you what you are, not because He had any need of you, but solely out of His Goodness.
He then urges the reader of these meditations to give thanks to God:
Give God thanks. O Great and Good Creator, what do I not owe Thee, Who didst take me from out that nothingness, by Thy Mercy to make me what I am? How can I ever do enough worthily to praise Thy Holy Name, and render due thanks to Thy Goodness?
After giving God thanks for creating us, a natural response is to do all that we can to follow our Creator and to do anything he asks of us.
I will alter my ways and henceforth follow my Creator, and realize that I am honored by His calling me to the being He has given; I will employ it solely to obey His Will, by means of the teaching He has given me, of which I will inquire more through my spiritual Father.
If ever question God's love, we can look to our own life and how our very existence is the result of God's love for us.