When I was younger, vv. 12-16 of the fourth chapter were some of the most important to me in the Bible. Now I am middle aged and not quite sure what to do with them.
When I was in high school and college, I did receive confirmation of my spiritual gifts through prophesy. I never had a blueprint for what I was supposed to do with these gifts, so I spent my early adulthood doing things that I thought would put myself in a position to both fine-tune the gifts and give myself more credibility. I earned a master's degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in government. I served in the churches I was in and did gain credibility within those churches.
Then I got married. My criteria for getting married for as long as I can remember is that I should be able to better serve God with my wife than without my wife. I found a woman who had strengths in my areas of weakness and we married. I have since found that I am serving God less effectively. The marriage drains my energy and I am constantly doing things to fix things for her because she has glaring weaknesses in my areas of strength. But it saps up all of my energy and I am no longer serving God. In addition, my spiritual gifts have been neglected and I feel like they are weakening.
That's primarily why I am doing these "thoughts on" posts. I am trying to exercise some of my spiritual gifts and get them back into shape so that hopefully I can get back to serving God and live up to the potential He gave me. I'm not even remotely close to being there yet. I look back on some of my older writing and listen to some of my old talks and am in wonder of what I was once able to do. Now I just feel tired and hopeless that I can never get back to where I once was, let alone to where I know I should be. I neglected my gifts and now I feel the consequences of that neglect.
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