Building Trust in Natural Feelings of What to Pursue

In Romantic Sense of Kinship, I talked about romantic feelings and how they seem to call for action. But this question can be generalized. Other kinds of feelings can call for action. Which should we pursue?

Our natural feelings can be helpful guides to what is good to pursue if our nature has been tuned to be in line with God and reality. If we value what God values and have (consciously and subconsciously) an accurate map of reality and of our ability to act on that map, then we will have good desires and be in a position to act on them. Then we can trust our own intuitive senses of what is desirable to do.

If we have God's values (more or less), then we will be in kinship with him. If we find someone romantically attractive, it will likely be because we share kinship with them, and there's a good chance that their kinship with us will imply their kinship with God. A kinship with someone else that is along the road of values that inherently involve us being kin with God is a good pathway across which to connect, bond with, become loyal to, someone else. So then it is likely that if we sufficiently share God's values, there is a high probability that whomever we fall in love with is either God's particular choice for us, or one of a number of acceptable choices we could make. (This discussion also applies to other forms of friendship.)

With romance and friendship, a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out if pursuits (pursuits of people) are worthwhile is done by just figuring out kinship. Finding kinship, shared values, is a big part of facing reality in that context. But what about work pursuits? There competence involves more than just fitting the values of the work pursuit with your own values and your own values with God's values.

One way to be competent is in the usual worldly way, and there's a lot to be said for diligently building up your competence in a worldly way. But sometimes you can be more competent by being guided by God, and also, it is very important for your spiritual life for you to love and trust God, and listen to God. Sometimes, your own salvation may be more important than whatever good you would have done for others, for all you know. So it could be best for you to pursue an altruistic method that has attunement with God baked into it.

If you become kin with God, then he can speak to you more richly. As you become kin with God, you develop sensitivities, memories, and understandings, through which God can speak to you. A pipe organ may have many small pipes, and many large ones, shaped in different ways to produce different sounds. If a pipe organ lacks the 32 foot or 16 foot pipes (the longest ones which produce the lowest notes), a piece of music might not be playable, one which relies on bass sounds. Or if it is played, it lacks the bass, and doesn't convey the composer's full intentions.

The better God can speak to you, the better you will become and be kin with him, and sometimes the better decisions you will naturally make in work and friendship.

So if we want to trust our feelings when they say to pursue something, we should become trustworthy, so that our natures are trustworthy. We do so by developing kinship and trust in God and by building competence (and kinship and trust with God can help build competence.)