What’s better than grumpy? Friendship with God.

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The eternal God is our Father and our Friend. When we say “God,” we refer to the awesome Creator. And the amazing thing is that the Creator of the universe has an intimate and personal relationship with each one of us. We are not forced, but he knows us thoroughly and forgives us when we stumble, and he is our friend.

We can seek divine fellowship in spiritual experience. We can share our inner life with God. We can talk with him about anything. He is a great listener. And he responds, Person-to-person as spirit to soul. We can feel it. We feel it increasingly as we grow.

Our experience with God as friend is the number one reason to regard the universe as friendly. But there are many other reasons. When we consider the wise and dependable laws of nature, how marvelous that they support life on so many levels. Animals can understand and cope with their environment in a way that sustains their life, and so can humans at various levels of scientific understanding. From the discoveries of the ancient world to classical physics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics, we can understand and cope.

The universe is also friendly to the search for wisdom. We can seek, explore philosophically, pray thoroughly, and find wisdom.

The friendly universe blesses us in the beauties of nature, from the galaxies, planets, and meteor showers that light up the night sky, to oceans and beaches, islands and continents, plains and forests and mountains.

The friendly universe gives us the opportunity to contribute what we can to this beauty in the arts, including the art of living, in which each person can use his or her gift creatively to make our surroundings more attractive.

The friendly universe supports our need for morality and justice, since our minds have the capacity to develop our intuition of duty and to act on it. And sooner or later, this planet will experience a spiritual renaissance, when a critical mass of humanity align with divinely spiritual forces and commit to making this world a more friendly place. Indeed, our Creator-Friend has established for us a glorious planetary destiny.

And as we increasingly come to know and love God, our quest to become like God, the friendly universe supports our quest for perfection. We can begin to love others with the love that our Father-friend has placed in our heart. We can extend to others the friendship that blesses us within. We can know God as a loyal companion—a true friend.

What’s better than grumpy? Friendship with God.