Using Our Gifts for Others

-

Today my prayer took me to Psalm 139, where I am reminded that God knows me better than I know myself.  Yes, God knows the very depths of my being.  The Spirit of God is not passive, waiting in the background, but is very active, and is ready to help each of us to know God, and also ourselves.  We can gather all the human knowledge we want on our own, but to know God, to know our true inner selves, we have to be open to the Spirit.  We cannot do it on our own.  Before God, we are always humble. 

So we ask the Spirit for help—the Spirit, always eager to help us. Then what?  Again, we need the Spirit’s help to know how to best use this knowledge and the gifts we have been given.  We are called to be active and eager, too, in our response.  The Spirit can’t use our gifts unless we cooperate.  We have to say yes.  Sometimes it can be tempting to see how our gifts enhance our own reputation or our standing with others instead of how they can be used to build up others.  I belong to a well-educated community, and when I am with them I guess I want to be admired as a person who can make a significant contribution to a group, and I sometimes think of how well I’m being accepted instead of remembering that all my gifts are God-given, and that they weren’t given to me so I could look good, but as tools to build up the community.  So today I am asking myself: how am I using my gifts for others, how am I using them to build up the community?

How would you answer these questions?

Marie Lucek, OP
Juneau, Alaska

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nuns can have nose rings? (and other frequently asked questions)

-
Image
One of my favorite things about being a young sister-in-formation is allowing people to ask me their burning (and sometimes silly) questions about religious life.   Questions like: Do nuns have jobs?   Can you still go dancing and swimming?   You mean you get to keep that nose ring? Becoming a sister right now is an interesting thing: religious life has changed drastically in the past fifty years, but many people’s stereotypes about it haven’t.   Many of these stereotypes seem superficial (ie- all nuns wear habits; nuns don’t dance) but they may reflect deeper misconceptions about religious life… like the idea that sisters are somehow more holy or less human than “normal” people.   For a long time, my own misconceptions kept me from really considering religious life. And so I enjoy the questions.   I love making people feel free to ask them, and I love surprising them with the answers.   After all, they aren’t really asking about my nose ring; they want to know about this way
Read more

Happiness and Joy in Religious Life?

-
Image
I never wanted to be a religious sister (nun) because I felt I would never be happy.     This calls me to reflect on what is happiness.     Some say that happiness is a feeling.     It is when you feel good and cheerful about something that happened or is happening in your life.     However, I think that true happiness comes from when you make others happy.     After I went out of my way to assist someone and they unexpectedly tell me how much my helping meant to them.     I experience an unexpected warm feeling inside.     True happiness I think is a sense of fulfilment you feel even if what you did was not acknowledged, yet you know that deep down inside you did and gave of your best to help someone without any conscious ulterior motive.     You did it because it was the right and necessary thing to do at the time. Everyone searches for happiness and many know that true happiness cannot be found in things, but in how we help others just because they need help.  Many sisters in religi
Read more

Where are my...(fill in the blank)?

-
Image
Okay, I’ve finally learned to put my car/home/office keys in the SAME place when I get home.  But I still haven’t learned to remember where I left my glasses or my latest crossword puzzle or the flyer about a concert I now think I missed or that needed phone number I jotted down on a piece of paper – and I have a LOT of pieces of paper sitting around.  Yes, I am one of those people.  But that litany of “forgets” got me thinking about the important things I forget about until I really need them – like prayer, quiet time, reading something challenging instead of easy, actually calling my elderly cousin instead of saying, “I should really call Ruth,” and never doing it, working through a situation instead of avoiding it.   I challenge myself this week – and you – to take action, one small action, to overcome this very human weakness of losing, forgetting, neglecting something that we know is really important.  Is this easy?  Is there a shortcut I can take?  I’m afraid not.  But if we trul
Read more