God will be clear with your charisms. You need only to ask and discern them. Discerning our charisms can, then, help us become more intentional in our spiritual lives.
Unveiling God’s Clarity
God will be clear about your charisms, you need only listen. So how do we listen? Through pray, firstly. Everything we do should be a prayer. Also, taking a look at our talents, desires, and likes. These things will often point to God’s plan for us.
Understanding Our Charisms
Therefore, understanding our charisms is crucial in our quest to know and align ourselves with God’s will. By recognizing our unique spiritual gifts, we become more intentional and purpose-driven in our relationship with God. Our charisms act as touchpoints that enable us to connect with God in a more profound way. This strengthens our spiritual connection and helps us recognize His presence in our lives. God will be clear about your charisms if you seek.
Resources for Discernment
Additionally, check out Many Parts Ministries where you can access a free PDF guide to all 24 charisms. Many Parts Ministries also offers a charism assessment to kickstart the discernment process. These resources serve as invaluable tools for individuals seeking to discover and unlock their God-given talents and abilities. These will help you hear God’s voice loud and clear.
Tuning Our Ears to God
Finally, we must intentionally tune our ears to God’s voice with the help of the Holy Spirit. There are different ways to gain clarity and direction in our lives. We can engage in conversation with God or seek His guidance. Always, we can surrender to His will. With this intentional approach, we can confidently discern God’s will and align our actions accordingly.
The Holy Spirit inspires and guides our discernment journeys. By understanding and recognizing our charisms, we confidently discern His will for our lives. Remember to visit manypartsministries.com to learn more about the various charisms and begin your own discernment process.
Learn more at Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to Charisms for Catholics. My name is Jill Simons, and I’m the executive director at many parts ministries, where we equip the body of Christ by helping people learn about and discern their charisms, which is really another word for spiritual gifts. When you discern your charisms, you’re able.
Jill Simons [00:00:18]:
To see how the Holy Spirit is.
Jill Simons [00:00:19]:
Already active in your life and where he is inviting you to further build the church. Let’s dive in.
Jill Simons [00:00:31]:
So I have to be completely honest with you. Starting out, I have the worst headache right now. I am sitting in a completely dark room, literally with my eyes closed and the brightness turned down on my computer because my head is absolutely killing me. But I can’t not talk about all of the things that the Holy Spirit has been putting on my heart to share in this podcast. Originally, when I named it Charisms for Catholics, I was like, gosh, that’s really narrow. Am I going to get painted into a corner where there’s not really that many things to talk about? Is this going to be kind of a hindrance in the long term? But I have a list of over 60 episode ideas on my hard drive that I just can’t wait to get started on because it’s just bubbling up in me. And that is not because I am exceptional in some way. It’s because the Holy Spirit really wants to renew the church. And this is such a big part of that. When we look at what is it that we can expect from God as his children, the gifts to carry out his work and his mission is like really, really high on the list. And I think that that is ultimately what I want to talk about in this episode, is what should our expectations be for God to provide us with? Because I think that’s where a lot of people have this disconnect that makes charism seem kind of outside of the realm of possibility or seem maybe not like a foundational tenant in our faith. I talk about charism so frequently, a lot of people will ask me, do you think this is like the most important thing in the church? No, I don’t. But I think that it’s something that lends invaluable context to our spiritual lives. It’s a lot like knowing your learning style. Can you learn without knowing your learning style? 100% people have been doing it for hundreds, thousands of years. Learning styles and naming them as such is a relatively newer phenomenon, at least to my understanding. But when you know your learning style, that takes learning out of this kind of perhaps, maybe random occurrence and into something that you can really steward and control. So that when you are in your college organic chemistry class and you recognize the fact that you’re a lot more of an auditory learner than a reader, maybe you know that there’s going to be value in you seeking out auditory options for learning in that, because that is going to ultimately serve you as an individual. The best. That is exactly how we can think about charisms. Can you live a life fully alive in the Holy Spirit without knowing your charisms? I think you can, absolutely. I think thousands of people have done it throughout the history of the church, if not millions. But does it make it so much easier to be intentional when you do know your charisms? 100%. And so this leads us back to this idea of what can we expect from God? We can expect that God will make things clear. I think that that’s something that we don’t expect from God on a general basis. Now, I want to clarify what I mean by clear. I don’t mean God is going to publish a syllabus for the next ten years of your life and hand it to you. I mean that when you go to God earnestly and say, god, what is going on here? Or is this a gift that I have? The answer will be clear again, in God’s timing, not necessarily in our timing. Another important addendum we’d never want to think about God like a vending machine, but we also want to think about Him like a good father. And there are times when you ask a good father for sure straightforward question, you get a straightforward answer. This beating around the bush and having that as an expectation hinders a lot of people’s spiritual growth because they get this sense that having confidence in anything God is doing in their lives, inviting them to do, et cetera, has to be this nebulous stressful occurrence. Is that the truth? Sometimes? Is that our experience? It is. It is our experience sometimes. But just because something is our experience doesn’t make that the way it is supposed to be. So there have been lots of times in my life where I’ve been like, god, why aren’t you showing up? Why aren’t you doing something? Why aren’t you making something work? Everything’s really stressful and looking back just for myself, this is not something I can comment on in anybody’s life except my own. Looking back, I was not engaging in conversation with God about those things. I was telling God what needed to happen and it was not happening. And I think that that is something that follows that we can expect when we’re trying to legislate, when we’re trying to control God, we are not going to find success. And it’s not that I think that those situations in my personal history would be different if I had engaged in conversation with God. I think I would have been different in those situations. I think I could have given God the benefit of the doubt when I got nine graduate school rejection letters over the course of the week. I could have given God a lot more of a benefit of the doubt that this was for my good. This was a gift from my good. Father versus God. What the heck are you doing to me? Why do you hate me? And so we see that there’s kind of that adolescent impulse in ourselves when we aren’t hearing God, where there’s this block where we get stuck in the life kind of mind of a teenager in relating to God. We see this in so many teenage relationships with their parents. Obviously not every single one, but it is kind of a hallmark of that time in the parent child relationship where there’s this block of speaking and hearing but going both ways, where I think in the vast majority of situations. The parent really is focused on the good of the child, and it’s very, very hard for the child to perceive it in that way. And so when we enter into this expectation that God will be clear with us, we are tuning our ears intentionally away from that maybe teenage Angsty frequency and into a more mature frequency where we actually have ears to hear what is being shared with us, where we actually can realize, even if we do not know why, even if we don’t know what he’s going to do, we can have confidence and clarity in the fact that he is present, that he is moving, that he is doing something. I don’t think all those years ago that God would have said, okay, Jill, I’m having you rejected from these graduate programs so that this can happen, so that in five years this can happen, in ten years this can happen. No, I don’t think that there’s any reality in which that would have happened. But I do think that if I had been listening, he would have been there and was there speaking to my heart. I know this hurts, but it’s going to be okay. I am with you in the midst of this, and this is all for your good and my glory. And lo and behold, that was the truth, that I absolutely am so thankful that I got rejected from all of those programs. I don’t even want to think about my life if that had happened. It is a huge gift that things played out exactly how they played out. And so I think ultimately, that’s what charisms give us the space and the grace to do more easily than we can without them. When we know our charisms, we have some touch points where we are confident that we can get in touch with God. When we do those things again, we’re not magic. It’s not vending machine mentality. It’s the intentionality of realizing as a spouse, hey, if I sit down after dinner on the couch with my spouse, it’s way more likely that I’m going to feel connected to my spouse and we’re going to have a positive interaction that’s going to improve our relationship instead of going to the other room and playing on my phone. This is that same kind of thing. When we go to these places that we know that it is native for us to get in touch with God, to receive from Him, to give out of his abundance, then we nurture these places in ourselves where we can go to experience God and hear from God in a way that helps us to ultimately know his voice better, to know his character more, and to ultimately encounter him as he really is, so that we might love him more. And so all of these gifts that were given are for the good of the whole church. They’re for the upbuilding of the church. But the benefit that we see in ourselves when we use them is so much like the benefit that we see in knowing our learning style. So you have someone going to medical school, they’re aware of their learning style and they’re able to take personal responsibility, intention and stewardship for their education that’s ultimately for the good of their patients. But it also forms them as an individual into a kind of person that makes an even better doctor. And this is exactly what happens with charisms. When we know our charisms take intentional steps towards using and stewarding them well. That puts us frequently, regularly in a place where God is animate in our lives, where God is taking on this character in ourselves as temple of the Holy Spirit even more than the rest of our lives as we go through them, he’s always present in us. But there’s this powerful, special way that he is present when we’re using our charisms, and that is for the good of the whole church, but also ultimately makes us into a kind of person who is good for the church. The kind of person who has something real and valuable to contribute to the church that ultimately contributes to our own salvation. And even more than salvation, our own intimacy with God. Because I think that’s such an entry level thing to be going to heaven, so important, so beautiful. Thank you, Jesus, for dying on the cross for that. But I think a lot of us delay the fruits of our Christian life until that point. We say things are going to be good in heaven, which they will be. But I don’t think a lot of us pursue intentionally the good things that God wants to share with us here on Earth because we aren’t aware of them and we don’t necessarily trust that God will be clear with us about where they are. And so that’s the biggest takeaway that I want to leave you with is that if you feel yourself distrusting God, to be clear with you maybe about your charisms, maybe you think that you can’t really know what they are, that it’s going to be inherently prideful for you to know what they are. There’s no way for you to discern them well and then use them in a holy way that it’s always going to be this kind of tainted experience that’s all wounds around this idea that God will be kind of withholding from us, that God will not be clear with us. And there’s a lot of things that can go into that outside of the scope of what we’re talking about on this podcast and my expertise to share with you. But like so many things, I really want to draw attention to where the needs are and maybe also where the wounds are so that you can see healing. And so I guess just as kind of a footnote on where to go if you realize, man, this is a wound in me. This is something that I struggle with. I don’t believe God is going to be clear with me. Everything by Dr. Bob shoots is so wonderful. You can definitely start with his book Be Healed, but he also has beautiful books about sexual healing, healing in the sacraments, healing in marriage, just such good stuff. Everything that he has. I highly recommend that. And then also the Lozano’s family through the Unbound Ministries is just fantastic. That has brought me personally so much healing. Dr. Bob’s work as well, but I think those are great places where that is the focus of their apostolate is on this healing that is necessary and sometimes that is necessary to enter into before you really have the disposition to enter into active charism discernment and use. Because when we have those wounds that will often overlay our efforts, that’ll be something that becomes a focus of kind of that energy you get from a toddler or a young elementary school student who doesn’t really trust that their parent is proud of them or that their parent loves them. And there’s kind of that look, did I do good? Did I do good? Did you see that? And there’s that energy in your general population of children that age, but there’s a kind of a flavor to it when there’s a question in the child’s mind whether or not the parent really cares or really loves them or really has their best interest at heart. And we want to avoid that. We don’t want to engage in our charisms from that kind of performative place. We want to engage in them from really this confidence that we have that God is going to be clear with us and God is going to be kind in allowing us to know and fruitfully use the gifts that he has given us.
Jill Simons [00:15:44]:
Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics. If you would like learn more about your charisms or begin your own discernment journey, head to our website@manypartsministries.com where you can download our free PDF guide to all 24 charisms and also begin your own journey by taking our Charism assessment.
