Monday, May 14, 2012

Spiritual Abilities As Survival Skills

You, dear reader, along with every other person, have one or more spiritual gifts. This is true whether you are using your spiritual gift or not. It is even true if you have no idea what yours might be, or have never seen any evidence that you have any.


It is very important that you find out what your spiritual gift or gifts are and strengthen them and use them. It is as if your left hand was invisible and you only knew you had the right hand and only used it. Your left hand would not be helping you and it would get in the way all the time, but you would not know what was wrong. If you don't know your spiritual gifts are there, they don't help you and they get in the way all the time.


Not using your spiritual gifts is a much worse situation than an invisible, unused, left hand. Unused spiritual gifts is a form of serious sickness. Most of us have this sickness, so we consider it normal. 


I think of beginning to use spiritual gifts as being similar to when I got my first pair of glasses. I had not known that my eyes had not been working right for a while. I only knew when I looked through my glasses for the first time and saw things clearly. It took me at least a week before I calmed down a little, over the excitement of how bright and clear and beautiful things looked, through my new glasses. 


Beginning the use of spiritual gifts is much like the new glasses. You can't know what you are missing now. It is much better and more exciting, however, than better vision.


Many religions know about the existence of spiritual gifts. Most of them say that spiritual gifts are only for people who belong to their religion. I hate to disappoint people who think this is true. It is not. Everyone has them regardless of belonging to a particular religion or having no religion at all. If you want to, it is easy to check.


Spirituality and spiritual gifts are something that is not necessarily connected with a particular religion. One reason why people may think spirituality is connected with a particular religion, is that many religions accept that spiritual gifts exist, and make attempts to help people discover them and use them. 


When the people who belong to a particular religion find out what some of their spiritual gifts are and begin to use them, the religion is given credit for the existence of the spiritual gifts.


I am not very familiar with the understanding of spiritual gifts in any but Christian religions. I have a fairly good understanding of various Christian religions' view of spiritual gifts. 


Different Christian religions accept different numbers of spiritual gifts. The numbers vary greatly. The ones I know about range from twelve to sixty-four spiritual gifts, that particular Christian religions accept as being valid spiritual gifts. Each of those Christian religions uses certain verses in the Bible to justify their choice of which spiritual gifts they will accept. Each of them has a particular set of gifts and verses they like and they don't usually like the spiritual gifts that are not in their own accepted set.


I believe that it is possible there are more than 64 spiritual gifts. It does not seem like it is a good thing to put limits on acceptable spiritual gifts. It seems harmful. Some people in a particular religion are bound to have some of the unacceptable ones and run into trouble in their religion. 


If a religion believes that Gd gives spiritual gifts, then for humans to cause trouble to others for having the wrong ones does not seem like Christian behavior. 


I am going slower than I expected making a list of specific spiritual gifts and abilities. This is because it is especially difficult to explain them to people who have no knowledge of them at all. I must assume that some of my readers are in this situation. I feel it is better to not assume specific prior knowledge among readers. 

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