Charisms are for couples just as much as they are for the individual and the Church. How can charisms enhance your relationship and strengthen your spiritual bond?
Understanding Charisms
Charisms are the unique gifts or abilities that the Holy Spirit bestows upon individuals for the building up of the Church. They can manifest in various forms, such as teaching, intercession, administration, hospitality, and more. Recognizing and discerning your charisms is key to fully embracing and utilizing the gifts you have been given.
Applying Charism Discernment in Marriage
In the context of marriage, charism discernment takes on a whole new dimension. By understanding and embracing your spiritual gifts, you can bring the Holy Spirit more powerfully into your relationship. Charisms can complement each other, allowing couples to unlock new depths of love, understanding, and collaboration.
How to Begin the Discernment Journey
To start your charism discernment journey, it is essential that both individuals take the time to do a charism assessment. This will help you identify which gifts are most prominent in your lives. Many Parts Ministries offers a helpful free PDF guide that outlines all 24 charisms. Additionally, you can take an assessment that will guide you towards your unique gifts.
Sharing and Trading Charism Lists
Once you have completed the charism assessment, it’s time to share and trade your lists with your partner. This opens the door for deeper conversations about how your individual spiritual gifts align and complement each other. Consider giving specific feedback about how you have noticed the Holy Spirit working in your lives through charisms. These stories will be the foundation for further discernment.
Embrace the Holy Spirit’s Guidance
Charism discernment in marriage and charisms for couples is not a rigid requirement. It is a valuable tool for intentional spiritual growth and unity. As you become aware of each other’s charisms and the unique ways the Holy Spirit is within your relationship, you will be better equipped to support, encourage, and challenge each other.
Embracing and utilizing your spiritual gifts as a couple can deepen your bond, strengthen your marriage, and set you on a path of intentional discipleship. A great way to start this journey is through our free date night on charisms for couples.
Learn more at Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to Charisms for Catholic. 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 to see how the Holy Spirit is 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]:
I am so excited to be here with you today talking about what I think is most likely I haven’t run the numbers exhaustively, but I am pretty sure that it is our most requested topic which is for us to dive into how you can use your charism discernment process in the context of your marriage. This is a really powerful way to kind of level up your implementation of what the Holy Spirit is doing in you. And we’re going to talk today about some of the questions and things you can explore as a couple. And then I’d love to encourage you to head to the show notes and download the free resource we have available for you. It will walk you through having a date night. Essentially you can make that as formal or informal as you desire, but basically a chance for you to sit down with your spouse and go through a process really to explore your charisms together. So in saying that, I want to really add an addendum to the beginning of this process which is the fact that there is not like oh, this is how you do this and other ways are wrong. This is really a conversation that we want to facilitate. Just like if you were to have any conversation about an important topic with someone you are in intimate relationship with, that’s going to have as many expressions as there are people. And so all of our questions and prompts and ideas are really a starting point for you and your spouse to think intentionally about what the Holy Spirit is doing in each of you and the benefits in that are many. So I’ll go over a few quickly. If you’re at all on the fence about this or not sure if this is something that you would really like to do with your spouse, this is not something that is, like, a requirement, but just, like, charism discernment. In general, it is a beautiful, valuable piece of information that gives you a lot more clarity and a lot more space for intention, really, in your pursuit of what it is that the Holy Spirit is doing. And in this case not just in you, but in your family, in the person, in the relationship with that person that God has made the central vocation of your life. Because as a married person myself and you listening here, if you are married, know that this is the primary means by which the Lord is inviting us to get to heaven together, right? We want to bring our spouse to heaven, but we also want our spouse to help us to get to heaven because we are growing and serving and learning from each other throughout the course of as much time as we have together on this earth. And so when we bring in something like our charisms, we are able to speak into very powerful and very intimate realities about each other. We talk all the time about getting feedback from other people and we’ve suggested talking to your spouse multiple times on this podcast in terms of getting feedback about your own charisms. And that’s a really powerful part of this process. Even if there’s not just an earth shattering amount of clarity about the synergy between your charisms that comes out of your conversation, a lot of times there will be a very deep and abiding sense of clarity about your own charisms. Kind of at the very least, because a lot of times your spouse has encountered your charisms even more powerfully than anyone else in your life. That’s very frequent. I will kind of, as a disclaimer, I guess, say that if you don’t have a spouse who is particularly invested in their life of faith, this might not be something that they’re as able to identify in you, because that sensitivity to the Holy Spirit is really just lessened in people who are not in relationship with the Holy Spirit. And this makes sense on a natural level, right? If you know someone, you’re going to have a greater sensitivity to their influence than if you don’t know them. There’s nothing that’s going to really bring that to your attention because you don’t have that same level of knowledge and intimacy. And so when your spouse has an opportunity, your spouse who is also pursuing the Lord, hopefully with you, when they have a chance to encounter the Holy Spirit in you, it is really, really powerful and often so impactful. And I’ve worked with a lot of couples who have said, wow, I just had no idea what I was doing that was bringing the Holy Spirit into my marriage. There were things that I was doing, but I was unconscious that that was happening. And so if you think about playing a game of golf and you’re unconscious of the fact that you’re trying to get the ball in a specific hole, you’re probably going to have very slim chances of actually getting it in the hole. It’s going to be the exception rather than the rule. As opposed to knowing you’re on a golf course and you are trying to get under par on this specific course that’s laid out in front of you, when you know what you’re doing, you have so much better chance of doing it well. And that obviously analogy can be applied to anything that you would do intentionally when you know that this is how you bring the Holy Spirit into contact. Powerfully with your spouse, then you’re able to do it more. Then you’re able to really be aware. When your spouse, depending on what the charism is, when your spouse comes home and doesn’t have what they need, you can really be aware of what it is that you’re showing up with. Are you being invited to encourage, are you being invited to serve? Are you being invited to use what the Holy Spirit has given you to really minister to your spouse in some way? And obviously every charisms isn’t applicable to every situation, but it’s a starting point to really look at. This is how the Holy Spirit is using me on a regular basis. And so as you begin this conversation with your spouse, it really helps to have both gone through the charism assessment. That narrows the list for both of you, right? We’ve talked all the time about how it’s not vital, is not the only way to discern your charisms. But sitting down with a list of three five ish charisms that you’re each strongly discerning is going to make this so much more impactful of an experience for both of you than both of you. Just having the list of 24 and just kind of guessing at where your focus should be. So that’s one thing that I highly encourage. And it’s also really fun if you both take your assessment prior to going on this date or having this time together and don’t share the results prior to now. If you maybe have already taken the assessment and it was a while ago and you’ve already shared it with your spouse, that’s fine. It’s not like there’s anything that’s lost in doing it that way, but sometimes it can bring just a little bit more of that interest and excitement and curiosity into it. If it’s new information for both parties, not necessary, but a fun add on if you have the opportunity. Once you have both of them in front of you, we encourage you to just trade lists. So if you’re able to print out the sheet from your assessment that has your five highest ranking charisms, and print that out for both people and then just trade them across the table or whatever situation you’re in, give your lists to each other and then give yourselves a little bit of time to look through them, read them, and then just get feedback. What do you think of these for me? Here’s what I think of these for you. And try to be as specific as possible. If there’s an opportunity to share a specific story from your history together that speaks into them, that’s always better than just saying, yeah, I mean, that kind of sounds like you, then it’s just very general because that can be less convicting, we’ll say, in the charism discernment process than specificity. And so when you have a specific story that you can point to that’s going to help your partner really see where they have been walking potentially in that charisms. So after you have some time of sharing and hopefully maybe some reminiscing about how the Holy Spirit has been active in your relationship with each other, the next question I invite you to ask is how do we see these potentially fitting together? Looking at which charisms maybe are in common, are there some that you both have? Are there ones that are different but very complementary? For instance, leadership and helps super complementary where you have one person who really has that gift of vision and the other person who really has that gift of trying to be I don’t want to use second in command. In a negative way at all, but really being that support person for someone who has a longer, wider term of vision that they’re comfortable with looking at. If someone has healing and the other person has prophecy, how do we see those fitting together and really just diving into maybe? What is it that we can see from this list that maybe drew us together and where are we stronger together than if we were to just be using our charisms by ourselves? And in doing that, even if you are not exhaustively versed in every charisms, an adult with a reasonable grasp on the English language is going to be able to more or less, with the guidance of the Charism Guide, which is also free on our website, get an idea of what all of the charisms mean and how they could potentially be used. And if there is any confusion or question about that, we really encourage you to jump on our live calls on the fourth Tuesday of the month at 10:00 a.m. Central and ask those questions. We would love to follow up on a charism date with you and answer any questions that came up as you discussed your charisms going together. And so after looking at what is the connection and what is the synergy between our charisms, the next question I want to have you talk about together is what gifts, either ones that we have or other charisms do we see in our children? This might seem like a weird question for a date where you’re focused on you together, but it’s really interesting when you start to remember and think about your children’s lives. Even if they are quite young, if they are baptized in general, these are active in their lives and they probably don’t, depending on their age, potentially don’t have the self awareness to see that, but they could easily be walking in them already. And so as you reflect on what the Lord could potentially have given to your children, you might see that common threads arise within your family as a whole. Maybe a child that has similar gifts seemingly to a parent, maybe children having charisms in common, maybe they’re being one that’s even common to everyone in the family. And this is really one of the best ways to answer, I think, our second most asked question, which is how do I include my children in this information that I’m learning about how the Holy Spirit moves? And this has really, after a lot of prayer and thought about it, become my recommendation is to really start calling out the charisms you see in your kids, not expecting them to be able to self identify, take an assessment and know what their charisms could potentially be. But to build your own awareness of what does it look like for charisms to be operating, to be able to name them in your children? Not that you will have 100% accuracy and be right all of the time, but to start giving children that lens of even realizing that the Holy Spirit does want to move in them. And so after you reflect on what you have seen active in your children, and again, I recommend having the guide to charisms printed out and with you as you go through this process because that’ll be a valuable thing to refer back to. You don’t want to be like, oh, what charisms do our kids have? And just kind of stare blankly at each other because none of you actually feel comfortable knowing what the charisms are. So that guide will help kind of alleviate any awkwardness of that situation and just kind of guide you through the available options. But the next thing that I invite you to discuss is how do we see what we see in the children fitting in with us? And really just looking at where does this all come together for our family? Does it seem like there’s a very specific type of gifts or one specific gift or one specific kind of gift that our family has been given? So maybe our family is extremely heavy in gifts that are so directly geared towards active ministry. There’s a strong missionary gift or an evangelism gift or a faith gift or all of those existing in different people in the family and coming together and looking at, are we using these? Is this something that our family at the family level is prioritizing? And when we do that, we have an opportunity to set some priorities, which is ideally what this whole conversation leads into. How do we both use our gifts on a regular basis and how can we invite our whole family to be a part of using what the Holy Spirit is doing in all of us? And so that’s kind of where I love to end the evening, is, does this invite us to change anything about what we’re doing right now? The answer could be yes. The answer could be no. I think there’s a lot of couples that discern together and realize, wow, we are actually really doing what the Holy Spirit has invited us to do. And there’s a huge sense of encouragement and empowerment in realizing that. And I think there’s other couples who go through the process and realize, wow, our priorities are kind of out of order here. We’re not intentionally making space for us to do these things, maybe even things that we enjoy, things that we are fed by. We’re focused instead on things that are driven by obligation, driven by maybe financial need, things like that. And that’s when you have the opportunity to come to the Holy Spirit together in prayer. And there’s a prayer at the end of the free download that you can use together to just bring Him what you have discerned together in this time. And obviously, it’s unlikely that you’ll get to an exhaustive, clear cut plan in one evening of talking about this, but you might. And in that prayer, we really just want to bring our plans, our priorities, our every part of this process to the Holy Spirit and ask Him to share with us what he has to say about what we have talked about. And so that prayer will guide you through bringing those priorities to the Holy Spirit, bringing those gifts that you feel you might have, that you feel your children might have. And also what you’ve talked about either continuing to invest in or changing in the life of your family and your lives as a married couple and individuals, and then making some time and space to hear from the Lord. Even if it’s something that both of you are uncomfortable with or don’t typically feel like you hear from the Lord. Just humor me, make some space. Let Him speak to you if he wants to. He does want to, but whether we are aware of his voice can vary. And if that’s something that makes you anxious before heading into it, I have a great workshop that you could do as a pre date night, and it’s called Hearing God Speak. It’s not very long, and it’s something that you could watch together as a couple. Do that on the first night and then do your cares and discernment on the second night and make some space to hear from God about his heart for you both as a couple and your family as a whole. What does he want to tell you about the things you’ve talked about tonight and the things that he is already doing in you and in your family? And so that’s it in a nutshell, is really having these conversations and then making space for God to speak. Obviously, you can add questions, change the format, do whatever works for you. Do it while you’re at your favorite restaurant. Do it on a Saturday afternoon when you’re both on the couch in your pajamas, whatever you guys want to do as kind of the dressing of this process. Just spend some time with these simple questions and having real and meaningful conversations about them. I think the most important thing, the one thing that you can maybe do wrong going into this conversation is have a lot of preconceived ideas about exactly what’s going to come of it and how it’s going to go. Saving some space for curiosity in this process is going to really increase the potential impact it can have on you and your life as a family, because then the Holy Spirit really has space to move. You actually have space to encounter each other and to learn something new about yourself, about your family, and come to understand better how the Holy Spirit is active in all of your lives. So this resource is available now. You can head to the show notes to download it. It is totally free. There is no cost, and we have links at the very front for you both to be able to take your charisms assessment, which is the only thing that there is a cost associated with in the program. It’s just $9 to take the charisms assessment and you’ll each get a beautiful personalized guide to your potential charisms that’s really, really valuable for the discernment process. So we invite you to check that out and let us know what you think.
Jill Simons [00:21:17]:
Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics. If you would like to 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.
