Motivation is a crucial and ongoing theme on the path to God.
How can we stay motivated for this journey when so many things in everyday life seem to occupy our attention?
The motivation of love
The deepest and eternally sustaining motivation is love - the longing for God, which encompasses our love for Him. It is not a selfish longing or love, but that force which enables us to let go of everything else.
It even allows us to develop the willingness to let go of ourselves for a moment.
It is the only thing that safely leads us beyond death - that moment when we must let go of everything and can only guess what awaits us in the afterlife.
The writings of Saint Macarius had an enormous motivating effect on me. They gave me the courage to trust in God and to stop relying on myself, but rather on Him.
Letting go of everything and trusting in God leads us into a temporary emptiness - into a zero-point state, in which a vacuum of love is created.
This vacuum is then filled by God Himself, and in the end, He will give us everything.
We are reborn by God in His love.
Because we often do not yet have direct access to this deepest motivation - this longing for God - we need the path of prayer. It leads us to this innermost point of our being.