The Purpose Driven Life: Day 31

In day 31, Warren continues his discussion of how God SHAPEd us to serve Him with Abilities, Personality, and Experiences.

Warren asserts that God gave us our SHAPE – our spiritual gifts, affinities and passions,  talents, personalities, and experiences – for a reason and that we will be most fruitful, successful, and fulfilled (in serving God) when we do things that draw on, and adhere to, our SHAPE.  It turns out that Warren lumps the talents I talked about in day 30 – what you’re good at – into Abilities, so I’m still clueless as to what a spiritual gift is (though it’s clear you only get them when you “become a believer”).

So, using our gifts and talents to do things we like doing in service to others as befits our personality and draws on our experiences…Well, that’s downright logical.  He makes it sound so easy.  And yet so many people, myself included, are languishing in existence rather than thriving in life.  Why?  Are we not chasing our passions?  Do we even know what our passions are?  Are we not using or developing our talents?  Are we not serving others?  Are we in jobs that conflict with our personalities?  What are we allowing to hold us back?

For me, it’s been loads of fear:  fear that I’m not good enough and fear of destitution.  I see such fear in many others – people who have traded what they love (or the pursuit of finding out what that is) for what someone else is willing to pay them (handsomely, in most cases) to do.  We exchange life for an existence of creature comforts and the illusion of financial security.  Then we develop what a friend recently described as ennui – that luxury psychological ailment to which anyone who has satisfied their basic security needs is prone.  Not knowing what’s wrong with us or how to fix it, we turn to self-medication to either stimulate excitement or numb pain – alcohol, food, drugs, illicit sex, shoes, etc.

But, I digress…

Warren promises to show us how to discover and use our SHAPE in the next chapter, so maybe he’ll be able to answer some of these questions there.  Maybe we’ll also find out what a spiritual gift is.

TL;DR:  No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.