Hi all. How do you balance having deep hope and working hard for a goal while staying truly detached from the exact outcome? How do you keep your heart open to God's will when things do not go the way you prayed or planned?
Hi all. I am a Baha'i currently going through a crisis of faith. I’ve been thinking about the Baha'i idea that God created the universe because His love was "overflowing," and wanted to be known. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the logic of it. If God is completely self-sufficient and doesn't need anything, how does an inherent need or impulse to express love fit into that? To me, an "overflow" feels like it requires an external object to receive that love, which seems to contradict the idea of total divine independence.
Was creation actually a free choice, or did God's own nature make it a necessity? Why were we created? Why does God want us here truly? Why does God want us to know Him? In the time before creation, we didn't have any needs or desires, but it seems like God did, if you can call it desire? However guilty I feel saying it out loud, I would have preferred never being created. I think it is also why the idea of Buddhism really resonates strongly with me because it accurately frames that life truly is suffering and Nirvana, the cessation from the cycle of rebirth, the extinguishing as the ultimate goal.
I'd really love to hear how Baha'i faith addresses this tension, or how you guys personally look at it.
Hi all. I have been grappling with this issue for a while now. I wanted to understand to what extent that prayer can guarantee outcome in the physical world. Like healing from a disease or encountering fatal accidents or things of that sort. I understand that action is incredibly important for a prayer to maybe be answered, but isn't action literally the prerequisite to make anything happen. An atheist can move mountains too if their desire is paired with the right action. I just don't really understand how prayers work in context like this.
If anyone says that prayer is mainly for communicating with God, that was not the question that I asked.