Our role is to be children of God. Yet our egos sometimes have different roles they’d like us to play. Sometimes, my ego assigns to me the role of God. Sometimes, the role of Devil. Most times, it casts us in different roles between these extremes. It assigns to us any part besides that which we really are.

What does it mean to be a child of God? It means to be who and what we really are in the sight of God. What does God see? What does God see in us?

God is, by definition, beyond all definition. Yet the closest we can come to understanding that phenomenon which is beyond all understanding, is to call it love. If God is love, then we, too, must be love. For everything creates what it is. Even the ultimate must abide by this law.

If we are love, then we cannot help but love. For love is both the subject and the verb, the lover and the object of her desire. Loves loves. Love is the actor which acts, the verb which is the action, and the predicate which receives the action. It’s the whole sentence. Love loves love.

This is our role.  This is what it means to be children of God. If you believe in God, it must be thus. You can argue the point, but like can only yield more of itself. And so, if God is love, then it can only make love, which can only reproduce more of itself.

To be a child of God is to forgive all, for God forgives all. It is to have nothing but compassion for all. Since God is mercy, it means we are merciful. Since God is infinite generosity, we, too, must be ceaselessly generous. God gives all to all. We, too, are conduits which must let flow all for all.

This is what it means, then, to be children of God. No more. No less. And since God cannot Itself be measured in terms of more or less, in terms of quantity, neither can we measure ourselves that way. Since God never changes in quality from being its perfect Self, then we, as children of God, will never vary in quality either. Unborn, perfect, God gives rise to the deathless. In human form we seem fallible and subject to death, yet the children of God are beyond human.

We will come to know ourselves as eternal extensions of the One, for love is endless expansion. Were God a place, it would be an infinite expanse. Were God time, it is a time that lasts forever. Yet God is beyond place, and beyond time. How could It, why would It, make anything less than more of Itself? It is boundless generosity. Without bounds Itself, anything connected to It is without boundaries as well, and therefore shares in Its illimitable nature. This is what it means to be children of God. And why, and how, could God make anything less than its own children, as your highest and best fruit which you most treasure are your own children.

When your children mature, you regard them as peers. When love ripens, it leaves as its offspring more of itself. This is what it means to be children of God.

We say that the dead never come back to tell us of all this, to speak to us of paradise or bliss or God. That they never speak to us of the infinite or the timeless. Yet that is because they have never died. Those who have passed on are all around us, always, so near to us that they are too close to touch. So like to us that we cannot distinguish them from our very selves. They live always within our hearts. They see through our eyes. They are the feelings we have for a friend. And that which is beyond space, which transcends all time, whispers to us in a language which spacetime cannot understand. We are as fish who cannot tell ourselves of the waters in which we breathe and swim. The dead are that very ocean. So close are we to love that we cannot distinguish it from ourselves. This is what it means to be children of God.

All else is seeming. None of it but love is real. And when the evidence builds to the contrary, and it will, and when the voices whisper or shout all around that you are something other than that supernal light, remember that you can no more change your true nature than can a lover stop loving. This is what it means to be a child of God. You are, each and all, children of light. No one else’s children could you be.

As children are not to be adjudged as evil or less than, neither can you be judged, for you have never stopped being a child. The one alive in your heart whom you always were lives still, and its supreme innocence can never die. Anything less would defile God Itself. Birthless, deathless, this is what it means to be children of God.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within