Helping Others

Helping Others

The Bible reveals that God gives abilities and talents to each one of us. These abilities and talents are often called gifts. The gifts God gives us can include talents for music, communication, encouragement, organization, mercy, giving, teaching, helping, and many more. God gives us these gifts to help others. Your gifts have a specific purpose and are unique to you. God wants you to use your gifts to show your love for Him and for others. You can experience great joy along with a sense of fulfillment when you know how God has gifted you and you use those gifts to help others.

Do you know what your gifts are? More often than not, your gifts are tied directly to the things that help make you feel alive and happy about what you are doing. For example, do you absolutely love hosting people in your home or organizing the office parties at work? If so, you may have the gift of hospitality. Are you a single person and are able to control the natural human needs for physical and emotional intimacy with a member of the opposite sex? If so, you may have the God-given gift of celibacy like the apostle Paul had. What about making things? Do you love making craft items or building things? If so, you may have the gift of craftsmanship. Whatever your gifts, find out what they are and use them to help others and to bring glory and honor to God. In the process, you will find that you, too, are blessed because God will give you a sense of peace and fulfillment that you cannot get anywhere else.

If you have never taken a spiritual gifts assessment, I encourage you to take one to find out what your spiritual gifts might be. Once you know what they are, you can ask God to show you opportunities in which you can use them. If you have taken a spiritual gifts assessment before but it has been a long time since, I encourage you to take one again. Why? Because being reminded of what our gifts our can be self-encouraging. The reminder helps us to engage a greater focus on helping others in areas that we are gifted in.

There are many spiritual gift assessments that you can complete. Try this one for starters at http://www.kodachrome.org/spiritgift. It is written simply and clearly and provides an easy-to-understand description of the various gifts identified in the assessment.

Stop the Insanity

Another year has gone by and a new one has begun. Like most people, I engage in the annual ritual of reflecting on whether or not I accomplished my goals from last new year’s resolution then create new ones for the coming year. Like most people, I do not accomplish the majority of my goals and roll them over to the list of goals for the coming year. I reluctantly confess that some of these goals have been rolled over from year to year to year for decades.

As I desperately fought the feeling of being a failure while going through reflecting and goal-setting, an Albert Einstein quote and Thomas Edison story came to mind. Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. As I reflected on the previous year and set goals for the new year I realized that my life is proof that Einstein’s definition of insanity is a fact, maybe even a cosmic truth! I also realize that if I do not want to be in the same place twelve months from now, I need to…I have to do things differently.

The first thing I have to do differently is replace a failure mentality with a lessons-learned mentality. Thomas Edison worked for years to develop the light bulb. His biography reports that after he discovered one theory that did not work, he immediately developed another and tested that theory. When that theory proved to be unsuccessful, he replaced it with another, then another, then another. He repeated this process until he succeeded. Edison went through thousands of attempts before creating the light bulb. The story goes that Edison said he did not view his unsuccesful attempts at failures. He viewed them as lessons learned and took that knowledge into the next attempt. I want to think like Mr. Edison. I want to stay so committed to a belief and a dream that I will not let an unsuccessful attempt (or thousands of unsuccessful attempts) create or perpetuate a failure mentality. Instead of continuing to do the same thing over and over, I want to try something different and keep trying until I find what works.

What about you? What are you still trying to accomplish by doing the same things over and over? Do you need to start with an attitude adjustment like I do? Or have you already adjusted your attitude and now you need to change your behavior? Whichever one it is, let’s stop the insanity this year and do things differently.

Life Can be Hard at Christmas

For the last couple of weeks, a friend and I have been talking off and on about how life can be hard at Christmas even when we have great family and friends who love us. Christmas is a tender time for the human heart. The holiday season boasts of peace, joy and love, yet we hurt over losses, relationship challenges, lost or stagnant dreams, and missed goals. Emotions are stirred up and can crash into each other and we experience many things. The season of hope over the birth of Christ can feel more like an open season on our emotions than a season of hope.

Why is this? Why does the most hope-filled and joyful holiday of the year seem to trigger anything from a sense of melancholy to intense feelings of grief and loneliness? Could it be that the enemy of our soul might try to distract us from the true meaning of Christmas?

Jesus was born as the hope of the world. The Christmas holiday celebrates the birth of the Son of God Who chose to enter into human history by living as a man and dying for our sins. Being forgiven of our sins and escaping their penalty is a message of great hope. It is a message and a story that the devil will do everything he can to stop. Two thousand years have gone by, yet the story of a child born in a barn with angels announcing His birth is still told. I believe the devil knows he cannot stop the telling of the story so he uses other tactics like conflict, loneliness, and grief to distract us. He also uses depression and sickness among other things. The goal? To get us to doubt God’s love and goodness toward us so that we will not believe in the Son that was born to us, the One Who can save us and speak hope, peace, and love to our hearts.

I don’t know about you, but I experienced many painful emotions this holiday season. In spite of these emotions, I made sure I focused on the hope and love that only God can give. I refused to doubt God’s love and goodness toward me even in the midst of grief and loneliness. You know what happened? God provided comfort for me in many ways right in the middle of the grief and loneliness. God was so creative. He blessed me with the opportunity to have a new Christmas tree for a room in my house where I have wanted to put one for ten years, a father who put lights up on the outside of my house, a daughter and new son-in-law who filled my stocking when they came to visit on Christmas Day, and a friend who let me cry on her shoulder (literally!) when I was hurting too much to keep it inside.

Christmas truly is the season of love and hope. And if the season triggered despair, discouragement, depression, grief, loneliness, or any other painful emotion for you, hold on tightly to hope anyway and trust God’s love more than you ever have before.

When the Time Was Right: God Can be Trusted

I love the phrase in the King James Version of the Bible, “It came to pass…” This phrase is used almost 500 times and the majority of the time it is used to refer to God’s predictions coming true. Throughout history, God spoke to people about what He was going to do. One of those things He spoke about was providing His only Son to be our Savior. He first spoke about this to Adam and Eve (the story is found in Genesis Chapter 3). It took thousands and thousands of years before God made good on His Word. And when He did, Jesus was born.

A contemporary phrase for “It came to pass” would be “When the time was right.” Sometimes we want what we want and we want it now. We want the pain to go away, to stop feel lonely, to get a positive report from the doctor, to find a better paying job, to have a relationship problem solved, to change a bad habit, or to receive deliverance from an addition. These are all good things to have and we might wonder why God doesn’t provide the answer to our prayer immediately. I admit I do not understand God’s timing and never will. However, I have experienced His timing and know it is perfect. God will never arrive one minute early and He will never arrive one minute late. When the time is right, all the things God has for You will be provided.

“…the time came [when the time was right] for the baby to be born and she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:6-7).

Even though it took a long time to come to pass, God kept His promise to give mankind a Savior. Whatever you do, do not give up on God. Trust Him and wait patiently for Him (Psalm 37:7). And when the time is right, God will provide for you.

Show Your Loyalty

For quite a few years now I’ve had people in a variety of professional places and settings ask me if I’m a Christian or if I go to church. It happened again today at work. This person I just met today and spent some time talking to asked me, “Do you go to church?” I told him I did and he said, “I can tell.” How could he tell? All we talked about was UFC/mixed martial arts fighting and Smallville. (NOTE: UFC is a professional, mixed-martial arts fighting sport. Smallville is a TV series about Clark Kent and has covered his life from his freshman year in high school to his present job at the Daily Planet. Neither one of these topics has anything to do with God!)

Now, I believe that going to church and a relationship with God are two different things but my relationship with God compels me to go to church. I also understand that when some people ask “Do you go to church?” they are really asking, “Do you believe in God?” After this man left to go do other work I wondered how it is that I get asked with no forewarning if I am a Christian or if I go to church. I realized a short time later that God is answering a daily prayer of mine that prompts some people to ask.

About two hours after talking with new UFC/Smallville friend, I rode the elevator with two other ladies on my way back from lunch. Both of these ladies had on Harley Davidson (HD) apparel. In addition to her HD t-shirt, one woman had on a skull-cap style bandanna with the Harley Davidson emblem centered right in the middle of her forehead. There was no way you could miss her advertisement and her loyalty to HD. As I got off the elevator I thought about my loyalties. I have White Sox apparel. I was even wearing my White Sox hoodie on the elevator ride! I have White Sox stickers and a White Sox license plate holder on my car. People don’t have to be around me very long to discover that I enjoy baseball and, most especially, the White Sox.. Evidently, some people don’t have to be around me very long to discover I believe in God.

Ironically enough, I don’t wear a skull-cap with “Loyal to God” on it. I don’t have a fish symbol on my car. (I’d have to be more careful about going the speed limit if I had one of those!) And I don’t even have a t-shirt that reads, “Jesus, the real thing” (but then I’m Pepsi drinker anyway!). So how is it that people pick up on my faith in God?

I think people sense something different and attribute it to God (or church) because of how I treat them. Every day I ask God to develop within the characteristics of His Spirit. These characteristics are called the “fruit of the Spirit.” They are love, peace, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (see Galatians ?). I more specifically ask for God to develop in me the characteristics of love so that I will be even more patient, kind, and gentle. I also want love to be expressed through me by being a person that is not easily angered, doesn’t keep a record of wrongs, and is not easily offended (see I Corinthians 13:4-8). I readily admit that I also ask God to let people see Him in me and be attracted to Him as a result.

I realize today that God has been answering my daily prayer for others to see Him in me. After all, the Bible states that people will know we are Christians by our love…not our skull-caps.

Someone Watching Over Me

In church on Sunday my worship pastor quoted Psalm 121. A verse familiar to me captured my attention: “…he who watches over you will not slumber” (verse 8). I was reminded that my God does not sleep. He watches over me and He watches over me all the time. I do not have to be concerned about God falling asleep on the job. His attention and watchful care is there 24/7/365.