Gifts of the Spirit

The Spirit of God.    The Spirit that   “in the beginning”    hovered over the waters, the same spirit that animated the clay corpse God had made –Adam–.  “Adam” isn’t a name, it’s a state of being… it means “Earth Person” or  “Person of the Earth”.   Or, in other words – Human Being, who came from the earth. 

And this Human being was animated by the Spirit of God.  The first gift of the Spirit.

These gifts are a blessing indeed.   A blessing.   But they have a shadow side – they are like a double edged sword.   

What was the first gift?  Life.    But life isn’t static.   It changes as we grow.   And there’s another shadow side to a gift...  the gift of “self-consciousness”.

The story says God made the man and the woman – and placed them in the Garden of Eden.  And they were free to do whatever they wanted, to eat of whatever they wanted.  They only had one rule – “Do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.   If you do, you shall surely die.”   And the location of this tree?   Right smack dab in the center of the Garden.    Really?!    It wasn’t placed on the edges, maybe hidden away behind some shrubs or something.

I suppose a case could be made that God basically didn’t trust Adam and Eve enough to leave the tree alone unless God could see BOTH them AND the tree at the same time.  And if the tree was hidden behind some corner somewhere, then, well, who knows what could happen with these kids.   Trouble, that’s what!    So the tree was in full view of God and all… and still there was trouble.   That plan didn’t work out so well, did it?

Adam and Eve were free – right?   They worshipped God freely.   They were fully developed people, were they not?    I’m not so sure.   I think maybe not.    Prior to eating from the fruit, they didn’t know they had a choice to worship God.   Sort of like our kids come to church with us – do they know they have a choice to NOT come to church?   Well, not for a few more years I think.  

So they eat from the tree.    And the world ends.  Or at least their world ends – the world as they knew it.  

Now they recognize they are more than just expressions of God… they are individuals.   They have “Self-consciousness”.   Evidently some doctors (maybe with support of studies) believe babies don’t know they are not their mothers.    The cannot differentiate themselves from their mothers.   They ARE their mothers as well.

In babies, it’s expected.   In adults – who can’t tell themselves apart from their parents… what would you call that?   “Failure to launch” or something?!

  

God:  Where are you?

Them:  We’re hiding.

God:  Why are you hiding?

Them:  We’re naked.

God:  How do you know you’re naked?

After eating from the fruit of the forbidden tree… the two people realize they are “separate from their mother” so to speak.   They are not the same as their creator.   I have to imagine there is some pain in this.   And yet, to become a fully functional adult we must (insert cliché here)… be ourselves!    In psychological terms this is called “self-differentiation”.   We must learn to separate from our parents so we can be… well, us… more.    And yet, there is pain in this!  

We are no longer that which we knew.   Now we are thrust in to a world of independence and self-hood.   

                        The gift of self-consciousness.   The younger kids are, the less they care whether they have clothes on or not.   It’s only as they get older that clothing – or lack of it – becomes an issue.     A little child might just as easily exit the bath with nothing on as with clothes on.   But when the kids get around 9, 10, 11, 12, 13…  things begin to change.   They come out with a towel on, or fully clothed.     They become more “self-conscious”, self-aware.     “We’re hiding.”  “Why?”   “We’re naked.”  “Who told you you were naked?”      The curse of “self-consciousness”.

But is it a curse?   I say curse, but I don’t mean it in the common sense – it’s not evil, or that bad things will happen.   I mean it’s the shadow side of the blessing; if not managed well, the blessing has within it the potential for pain and suffering.      We have been called to grow up!     And growing up, we learn that blessings do in fact have potentials for pain.    Sometimes the blessings of marriage end in divorce or separation.   But to be fully adult, we must risk the pain anyway, and strive for self-awareness, self-conscious.    

Even though there is the potential for us to drift into the shadow side of a gift… an important part of growing up is to realize the gifts of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil!   Wouldn’t you want an adult to know the difference between Good and Evil?     Wouldn’t you want an adult to know what’s healthy and what’s not?    Wouldn’t we want to be one of those adults, who knows enough to distinguish the healthier path in life from the unhealthier? 

“Cogito, ergo sum”… because I am, on some basic level, self-aware… self-conscious.  

Part of the maturation process is growing into becoming more responsible for one’s self, of making one’s own decisions…  and of living with the consequences.  This is part of self-responsibility.    At some point we have to recognize we’re responsible for ourselves… and our parents aren’t anymore.   For some, this realization is scary...  good-scary, but still a little unsettling.  

Adam and Eve had to leave Eden to become fully human!   God speaks to each of the three characters in turn; the serpent, the woman, and the man   To the Serpent – you shall crawl, slither on the earth from this time forth.  To the woman – you shall give birth, and it shall be painful.  To the man – you shall live off the land, by the sweat of your brow you shall live.   You no longer will have your “father” to take care of everything for you.    You will have to learn to be responsible for yourselves.   You will have to learn to be responsible for your own lives, to live off of your own work.    The story says that God placed an angel with a flaming sword to forever block the entrance to Eden.   We can never go back.   Nor should we, once it’s time to leave.            

I remember when we bought our first house.  It was 1991, and we were all of 26 years old, owning our first home.   It was time.  It was the right thing to do.   At the title company office, after we’d signed the paper-work, they shook our hands- “Congratulations!”    “Thanks… I think”  I was supposed to be feeling joy and happiness.    What I actually felt seemed to overshadow the joy.    I remember walking to the car from the office with a feeling in my gut I’d never felt before.   It felt very dense, heavy – like a rock was in my belly.  That house put us into $55,000 worth of debt.   Today, that seems like almost nothing compared to what houses cost – but that was the most debt we’d had up until that point.    Again, in the long-term it was the right thing to do.   But wow… at that moment… gulp!        

Ask a child (maybe one of 5 or 6) if they’re an artist, and they’ll probably say yes.  They might not mean it in a haughty or arrogant way – they’d just say that Yes they are an artist.   Maybe they love the sheer expressive quality of “doing art”.    And expressing this creativity makes them an “artist”.      Kids this age aren’t yet jaded, they don’t yet compare themselves to the high and/or impossible standards many adults compare themselves to.   Maybe children that age haven’t yet bought into the whole “perfection as a goal” mentality.    Children often believe that what they have to offer can bring joy, that who they are is special.   Maybe they recognize, in a very subconscious way, that the gifts they have, their talents, their purpose, are valid and legitimate.      Gifts – what a blessing!      

Now if you were to ask an adult if they are an artist, more than likely they would say “No.”   If you’re an adult reading this… Are you an artist?   Would you call yourself an artist?    I bet you didn’t ask first… “What do you mean by ‘artist’?”   You probably just said “no”.   You probably think it doesn’t really matter what I might mean by “artist”, that you’re not one anyway.    We adults believe we do not have the gifts of being an artist.   By now, we’ve learned to hold ourselves up to perfection, or at the very least to the professional standards of “Artist”…  and we do not measure up.   By this time in life, we’ve seen enough artists out there, been around enough art, and we know we probably cannot work at that caliber of quality.

“Are you an artist?”   What we unconsciously hear is:   “Have you been trained as an artist?”   “Have you gone to school to study art?”   “Do you work as an artist?”  “Do you make money as an artist?”   etc.     It’s harder to see the creativity we once took for granted as a gift still residing in us.   We’ve moved squarely into the shadow side of “Self-Consciousness”…               

Someone once asked – “Maybe if you asked people if they were ‘artistic’ instead of ‘an artist’, you’d get more people to say yes.”   I think what they were trying to say is, -if you lower the standard (or opened the standard up more –  in this case from “artist”, to “artistic”,) more people would be able to see the gifts of creativity and art in themselves.    But that’s the point, the word “artist” doesn’t have to imply years of specialized training, or that one must make a living with the gift of creating in this way, or that the gift of creativity is beyond the grasp of the average person.     We are very self-conscious about this.    We associate the word “artist” with a particular caliber of quality… and most of us have come to believe our abilities do and gifts do not reach to that standard.    But can “creativity” (dare I say it – our own gift of creativity) stand on its own right, and not have to be compared to a professional caliber standard?  

About 18 years ago, I was part of a prayer group in our church.     There were four total; two of us men, and two women.   The other guy was a Naval officer in the Medical Corps.  He worked in Naval Medical Policy – he’d often brief congress on what the state of medical policy was in the Navy at that time.   He played with the big-boys so to speak.   One evening we were to meet at someone’s home.   Three of us where there, just waiting for the other guy to arrive.   About 20 minutes into our start time, I called him to see if he was on his way.   He did answer the phone, but said things that struck me, and stayed with me since then… he said, in quite a bit more diplomatic way, that he thought maybe we didn’t really want him there.    I thought, “WOW!   If this guy struggles with bouts of insecurity, then ANYONE can!”   At that moment, he was VERY self-conscious!

In Eden there was freedom!     Gifts abounded!      We could create!    We could eat what we wanted, we could do what we wanted, anytime we wanted, except of course for the “tree-in-the-center-of-the-Garden” thing.    It was pretty much an all-you-can-eat, all-inclusive, climate-controlled resort with everything we like there!     But we weren’t really responsible for anything, much less ourselves.     No responsibility…  no sense of accountability…   no need to really strive for growth in any field of study or practice, much less in the challenges of being human.     We didn’t even know there was such things as self-responsibility or accountability.     We weren’t fully mature yet, we weren’t fully self-aware or self-conscious yet.   

Outside Eden, life was indeed harder.   The challenge was to work towards self-awareness and self-consciousness.     But we were also very susceptible to self-doubt and becoming self-critical.    The blessing of creativity, the blessing of personal gifts… we learned we had them… and we needed to use them properly.   But we also learned to twist and turn these gifts in the shadow side; “We’re not good enough!”  “Our gifts – who we are – aren’t good enough!”  

    

This idea that we – & what innate talents and gifts we might have – aren’t enough… is as old as the bible itself.    I’ve seen it pretty clearly in the famous story of the “Feeding of the 5,000”.   In the story, Jesus evidently has been teaching, and healing many, many people.   When it gets evening, the disciples come to Jesus and tell him he needs to send the people away, that they need to go home – or somewhere else – to get some food.     He asks them what they have with them.    They say there’s only 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.   Now the text (Matthew 14) says there were about 5,000 men, not including women and children.    Could we reasonable assume there were an equal number of men, women and children there?   I doubt there were 15,000 people.   Maybe it seemed like that many, but regardless, the author of the story is trying to tell us there were a lot of people there!    But still, what’s 5 loaves and two fish compared with “a lot” of people, right?    The ggifts of the 5 loaves and 3 fish are negligible compared the number of people that need to be fed.   

We usually think of this as Jesus magically making the little bread and fish they had to be able to feed all those people.   Granted, that pretty much IS a miracle.   But let’s go deeper into the metaphor.      What the disciples think is what we all think… “All we have are… (insert gift here)”.    “It’s not enough for…. (insert situation here)”.    What we have to bring to a particular situation (our innate talents and gifts) isn’t (we think) good enough to make a difference in the situation.   So we’re reluctant to even bring them up.   I’m not an artist!  I know what artists do… and I don’t do that!          

What does Jesus say?    “What do you have?”– talking to the disciples.      They only had five loaves and three fish.     “Bring them to me”, he says.       He blesses the gifts… and returns them (the gifts – in this case loaves and fish… that are up to this point apparently not enough) to the disciples and says, “You feed them!”    And that’s key here.

The brought what they had – which didn’t seem like enough – to Jesus to bless.  He blesses them, and returns them… those apparently insignificant gifts…  to the disciples to distribute back to the people. 

And the story goes on to say they all ate, and were satisfied.   And there were 12 baskets left over.   They all ate and were satisfied – and there was so much left over.   The gifts not only were enough!   They were over-abundant!    What gifts do you have to make a difference with?    I don’t think God is asking if we think our gifts are enough.     I think God is asking us to bring what we have.     I think God is telling us our gifts will be more than enough!

I asked people here to do two things – and I’ll ask you to do it too:

#1 – I asked them here to write on a piece of paper a gift they thought someone in the congregation had… something you felt was a gift, but hadn’t told them yet.    I asked them to place the name of the person they were writing about, and bring the piece of paper up front.   This was anonymous, so no one knew who wrote what.   But the name of the person they were writing about was listed.     So later on, I shared with person listed on the piece of paper what someone had written about the gifts they thought they had.   It makes a difference to know others see gifts in you, gifts you otherwise might not see.    It’s affirming.    

But I’ll ask you differently… please share with someone a gift you see in them, maybe a gift they might not see in themselves.             

And #2 – and this is the harder one of the two exercises… write on a piece of paper a gift you would like God to bless.   

Don't dwell only on the shadow side of your life... you do have gifts, and whether you think those gifts are insignificant or not, they can indeed make a difference in the world!   We all have a responsibility to grow, to mature.  And part of this is to take our place - whatever that might be - among our people... to share what we've been blessed with, to make a difference.    I think more often than not, these gifts are hidden -- especially from ourselves.   

Let God bless them, and see what happens!      

And God bless you!