“human beings can’t make one another really happy for long… You can’t love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”
If we can’t learn how to say, “Thy will be done,” then finally God must sadly say, “Okay, then thy will be done.”
The problem is that the relationship with God must be recognized as “older and closer.” The first commandment is to love the Lord our God, and the second is to love one another.
Picture it this way: Your life is a bicycle wheel. Every spoke in the wheel represents different and significant relationships that make up your life. One spoke represents mom. One spoke represents dad. One spoke represents a sibling. One spoke represents your spouse. One spoke represents a child, and on it goes. Our tendency is to make God a spoke in the wheel, but God isn’t interested in being another spoke in the wheel of your life. God is to be the center hub that all the spokes come from and connect to. As T. S. Eliot put it, He is “the still point of the turning world.”
For only when we love God properly can we begin to love others properly.
God has ordered our lives in such a way that devotion to Him is the top button. If that relationship is in proper order, then you’re going to find that every other relationship, whether family or friend, is going to fall into place in a far more satisfying way. But if you’re wrong on Him, you’ll get everything else wrong too.