I heard the comedian George Carlin once say that he could save everyone the trouble of going to college by simply teaching us what we would remember 20 years afterwards.

So he summed up the memorable lessons of a college education in several fields. What will we remember about economics? "Supply and demand." Science? "E=MC squared." Religion? "God is everywhere."

God is everywhere. I've been told this since I was in first grade. While it is a concise truth, it is also a truth that we often fail to appreciate. Because if God is indeed everywhere, then God is in us, with us, and surrounding us all the time.

We should, then, be sure of God's presence, as sure as we are of the air we breathe. But if you're like me, you tend to doubt God's presence and God's love - that it is really here for you and summoning you at all times.

I've believed in God for most of my life. But only recently have I come to believe that God is everywhere and that this God who is everywhere loves me. At an intellectual level, I've always believed these things. I just didn't live that way.

I have spent years and years trying to force my own agenda for my life, and resisting anything in my life that did not fit in with my plans. In the end, I didn't often feel God's love because God didn't always empower me to take the path I had chosen for myself.

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus is astonished to find people at a banquet scrambling to get the places of honor at the table. They want to be perceived as important based on where they sit down at an event. They crave this recognition in order to feel good about themselves.

Jesus urges them to take a different path. He suggests that they take the least important seat - to allow the host to move them up to a position of importance if that is what the host desires. Then if they are honored, it will be genuine.

"My child," we're told in today's first reading, "conduct your affairs with humility and you will be loved more than a giver of gifts." Humility is how we are to approach our lives. Humility means not insisting that our way is best. Humility means keeping an open mind about other options. Humility means putting ourselves in a position where God can provide for us as God wills.

What will we find if we practice humility? Love. More love than we can possibly fathom.

A few weeks ago, my two boys and I went on a hike in a forest. It was supposed to take 15 minutes. It took two hours. We took a wrong turn and ended up on a much longer trail than we had planned to take. My boys thought we were lost, which they thought was a great adventure. We pretended to be lost and scared. We pretended to be rescued. We laughed and we played. When we finally ended up back where we had made the wrong turn, we laughed even more.

"We took the wrong turn, Daddy," my youngest son said, "and I'm glad. It was fun." I agreed. It was far better than our original plan.

God is everywhere, urging us to open ourselves to this love. If we can find the humility to accept God's direction rather than insist that our own plans are correct, we just might find that life is more fun.

Bill Peatman writes from Napa.