inventory your gifts
“By using love instead of control one can unite the world, starting with yourself & treating others patiently & gently as Christ did. Swindling your gifts is an affront to God by denying your divine treasure. Start by providing an opportunity for others to share their gifts as well as their souls. By helping others you are helping yourself & thinking about making a change.”
The lesser known Gospel of Thomas teaches us (among many other things) that God is not a far-removed individual, but instead is within each and every one of us. Godliness is fully attainable if we only open our hearts and our minds to connect with Divinity and Spirit.
As we are Spirit, originally and forevermore.
Helping Each Other
The market’s taken another nose dive. The global structure is fracturing. And here we are in our isolated coastal bubble. Nest eggs are disappearing and the government is being overrun by self-serving and misguided people who insist on cutting social services intended to help those struggling to make ends meet.
And so it now falls to the people to help one another.
And isn’t that what we’re here to learn? Humans have spent the past two thousand years struggling to balance prosperity with greed with service with tyranny.
Christ was an original religious anarchist.***
He stood firm (though surely shaking in his sandals upon occasion) in the face of both the secular and religious laws of His day. He maintained His connection to Spirit through prayer/meditation, soul searching, service to others, and boundless love and compassion.
Unless I’m mistaken, we don’t need to pay for five thousand seafood dinners in order to follow Christ’s example.
Gandhi was another soul who lived and loved for humanity’s sake. He remained patient, compassionate, and gentle, yet unwavering in his knowledge that peaceful action by and within a community is the only proper reaction to hate, violence, control, and tyranny.
Time for an Inventory
It’s easy to cast a vote every couple of years, and then wait for the benefits to swoop in. So if our government won’t take care of us now when we need it most, then it’s up to us to take care of each other. And that’s the clincher. For cities of people shuttling from work to school to soccer games to shops to the beach to church to movies to dinner and then back to work, taking care of strangers is easier said than done.
But I’m thinking that’s exactly what we need to do. And we start that by making a list of our talents. Our God-given gifts, as my mother used to call them. Once we’re consciously aware of what we’ve been blessed with, we’ll be better able to figure out how to bless our lives and others’ with them.
I’m working on my list. How about you?
***Credit for this phrase goes to my Jivamukti yoga teacher Andrea — I couldn’t have said it better!