Do you know what you bring into the room? Understanding our charisms, therefore, can have a profound impact on our lives and the lives of those around us. This is how we can recognize our unique gifts and learn how to unleash the supernatural through the Holy Spirit.
Discovering Your Charisms
By comparison, imagine two registered nurses, both dissatisfied with their roles in a hospital. Curiously, after undergoing the charism discernment process, they discovered that their gifts were 100% different. One nurse had the charism of hospitality, making people feel welcomed and at ease in new situations. The other nurse possessed the gift of healing. Although they held the same job, their charisms led them to bring completely different strengths and qualities into the room.
Unleashing the Supernatural
Moreover, we underestimate our abilities and undervalue the work of the Holy Spirit through us. The shift occurs when we realize the supernatural impact we can have and change our awareness. We bring a lot into a room! As Catholics, it is essential not to lose sight of our charisms and to remind ourselves of them through prayer. By intentionally bringing our charisms into each situation, we create a positive spiral drawing us closer to God.
Transforming Lives
Hence, the story of a nurse in a Catholic health system exemplifies the profound effect that embracing charisms can have. Initially frustrated due to power struggles, she started asking patients if she could pray with them on her own time. The result was nothing short of miraculous. Patients experienced emotional healing and she had a positive relationship with her coworkers.
The Power of Recognizing Your Charisms
Knowing your charisms enables you to identify what you bring into a room, especially in stressful situations. You can rely on your known gifts to guide and support you. This approach takes the focus off ourselves and redirects it towards inviting the Holy Spirit to work through us.
Charisms are powerful tools we bring into each situation we encounter. By embracing these gifts, we can positively impact others, our community, and our own spiritual journey. All charisms are vital to the body of Christ, and God delights in your growth and investment in your gifts. So go ahead, show up, bring Jesus, and unleash the supernatural in your everyday life!
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 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. Today we are talking about one of my favorite things to really just bring awareness to. This is going to be a quick episode, but I hope that this is going to give you a lot of insight into how you can carry your charisms into your everyday life. A lot of people go through a discernment process and then it’s challenging to know sort of what to do next when you come to sort of a natural conclusion to the process. Or maybe you don’t get much further than just taking the assessment to begin with.
Jill Simons [00:01:01]:
It can be hard to know what you’re supposed to do with this information. And so I want to encourage you to think of your charisms in this way. These are what you bring into a room. When you walk into it, you think about having like a tool belt on or something like that. These gifts that the Holy Spirit has given you are the tools that you are carrying into the situations you go into. One of my favorite kind of catchphrases is show up and bring Jesus. That’s the gig that is the Christian life. Show up and make Jesus the Holy Spirit.
Jill Simons [00:01:42]:
They’re all the same. God present. We want whoever member of the Trinity you want to lead with, that’s good, but make the Trinity present everywhere you go. And so when you have an awareness of what your charisms are, that informs what you know that you are bringing into a room. So, for instance, when I am surprised by a situation, when I’m put in a situation that makes me anxious, I have spent several years trying to default to what are the gifts that I know I have. And the best part about this is that it takes all of the pressure off of you. You don’t have to know how to respond to the situation. You don’t have to know the right thing to say.
Jill Simons [00:02:33]:
You can rely on these places where the Holy Spirit has shown you that he wants to be made present. And this is an awesome way to grow in trust, trusting the Lord to do what he has shown you that he parts to do. And so by letting him do that and show up in those situations, you create this excellent loop of instead of we think about spirals, being in a bad way, having, like in a downward spiral or emotional spiral, you actually have a spiral that forms in the opposite direction, drawing you closer and closer to God as you give him an opportunity and he shows up and then you trust him a little bit more. And you give him an opportunity and he shows up and you trust Him a little bit more. And this is, again, as I’ve said several times in the past, this is not a, like God is a vending machine mentality where if I put in the quarter he spits out what I want. This is a relationship with a person where we can trust him to do what he has said that he is going to do. And so that’s not something that we try and manipulate or take advantage of, but it is something that we stay aware of and trust to be executed on. And so when you are having times and situations in your life that are frustrating and overwhelming, then this gives you a playbook basically of what to lead with.
Jill Simons [00:04:03]:
And so to drive this home a little bit, I’d love to share a brief story of two different RNS that I went through, just kind of a one off charism discernment time with. They were both RNS at a hospital and they were both very, very dissatisfied in their work and they had essentially the same job. And so they went through the charism discernment process and started off with sort of beginning the discernment after their assessment with 100% different charisms. They had no overlap in theirs. It was straight down the line, like everything that was high for one was low for the other and low for one was high for the other. And so they were really shocked by this, sitting in a small group together because they had the same role in the outside world and none of the same gifts it looked like. And so as we talked through this, there was one nurse who it really quickly rose to the top, that Hospitality was really just at the center of what the Holy Spirit brought into a room in her. She made people feel welcome, she made people feel at ease, she made them feel comfortable in even new situations and just had this tremendous power through the Holy Spirit to bring his peace into situations and into people’s lives.
Jill Simons [00:05:32]:
And so that was what we talked about that night, was how could she shift the focus in her nursing career from what it had been to focusing on showing up with Hospitality? And the other nurse actually had healing as her highest charism. And it was funny because the nurse with Hospitality didn’t even have healing on the list at all. It was like the absolute lowest. And so there was a little bit of anxiety around that that we talked through. But the nurse that had ranked highly for healing shared really vulnerably about the fact that she had always felt this desire to pray with and for her patients. But she had always pushed it down. She was always afraid of what the result of that would be. And so she was exhausted in her job as an RN because she was exhausted at holding back the Holy Spirit.
Jill Simons [00:06:29]:
That was a power struggle that she was losing on a regular basis, and it wasn’t resulting in her doing the thing that the Holy Spirit wanted her to do. It was resulting in her being burnt out and frustrated on a perpetual basis with her job. And so she was part of a Catholic health system, and so there was an opportunity for her to be able to ask respectfully and not force anything on anyone, but respectfully ask patients if it would be all right if she would pray with them or pray for them on her own time. But when there was the opportunity to pray with them in person in the moment, she would do that. And she started seeing miraculous healings happen in her patients, so much so that the other nurses gave her the nickname the Fast Lane, that if this woman was your nurse, you were in the Fast lane. There was a good chance that there was going to be some incredible healing that was going to come through that whether it was healing of the disease that they were in the hospital for or other types of healing. Emotional healing and things like that also started to come from her bravery in putting the Holy Spirit out there, being okay with some people rejecting her, some people saying no and really leading with what the Holy Spirit was inviting her to lead with. And so as these women changed their concept of what they brought into the room, they were able to find so much more peace and joy in their Christian life because they were not holding back the Spirit.
Jill Simons [00:08:09]:
As the nurse with healing who had been trying not to pray for healing or undervaluing what the Holy Spirit was doing in them, like the woman with hospitality who had really just looked down on that and felt like that was just such a lesser thing that she was bringing to people. But both of them saw supernatural impact from realizing what they were in the room to do. They didn’t change their jobs. They didn’t change themselves. They simply changed their awareness of what they were bringing into their role, and it changed everything. And so that’s what I invite you to do as you discern how to continue to be present to your charisms as you go through life not losing track of what they are or what they likely are, as you continue to discern, having this be something that you actually put the extra effort into remembering. And one of the best ways to do that is just to add the list to your morning prayers. Like, Lord Jesus, help me to remember to encourage the people that I meet, the people that you put in my path.
Jill Simons [00:09:16]:
Help me remember to intercede for them. Help me to remember to be hospitable. Whatever your list of charisms are, just verb it and ask God to help you to do it more, to be aware of all of the opportunities that he’s putting in your path for you to use it. This will vastly, greatly change the results that you see in your life and the impact of the Holy Spirit that you see in your life, especially if you are a person who has loved the Lord maybe for a long time, but been very unsure about what that looks like carried into the rest of your life. This is what that looks like carried into the rest of your life. It looks like using the gifts that God has given you. And if that means serving others and being hospitable towards others or maybe giving or whatever the case might be, it’s okay. If it’s not leadership, it’s okay.
Jill Simons [00:10:16]:
If it’s not evangelism, it’s okay. If it’s not missionary, there’s not a better set and a worse set of charisms. All of the charisms are necessary and important to the body of Christ. And knowing which kind of cell you are, which is functionally on an analogy level, what your charisms are is kind of that cellular information about where you plug into the larger body of Christ knowing that helps you let go of all of that comparison and all of that potential frustration that can arise from wishing that you were somebody else. God doesn’t wish you were somebody else. He is perfectly satisfied with who you are as a created child of his and the gifts that he has given you. And he is so excited that the prospect of you growing in them and you being able to be given more as you intentionally invest in what you have. But he is patient with that process, and right now, all he wants you to do is bless where he has already shown you.
Jill Simons [00:11:23]:
He wants to be active in your life. God bless, and I’ll see you next time. 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.
