How to Recognize Your Spiritual Calling

What are you good at? There is at least one thing you are good at which others cannot do as best as you do. It may be a very minor thing like reaching your ears with your fingers from behind your back or a major accomplishment like turning back plastics into gasoline. Whatever it is, it is something unique, as unique as your fingerprint.

That unique ability you have can be the basis of your calling in life. You are called to be a gymnast or a technology expert. Or you may be called to be a great teacher or an expert programmer.

Some people are called to be great civil servants. Others are called to be loyal, trusted and productive followers.

Each of Us Has a Spiritual Calling

In the spiritual life each of us has also a calling. Some are called to be great spiritual leaders, like Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada. Others are called to be martyrs of purity, like Maria Gorettti. Others are called to be reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Others are called to be proponents of New Age ideas. Others are called to be church organists.

The question now is: How do you recognize your spiritual calling?

Ask the Spirit About Your Spiritual Calling

The answer is simple and yet it calls for a clear, extended explanation.

The simple answer is for you to contact the Spirit and to ask him about your spiritual calling. Basically, that is the answer. But it produces more questions on your part: How do I contact this Spirit. How do I know it is the good Spirit I am in contact with? The bad spirit may answer ahead of the good Spirit. How does the Spirit talk to me and how can I listen to his answer? Will he answer me with words, just like the words I use to talk to him?

You now have more questions whose answers may trigger more questions and it may take some time before you get back to your original question: How do I recognize my spiritual calling?

Fortunately in this area of our life we are not like blind persons in darkness looking for objects to guide our every step. We have our senses, our mind and our spirit to recognize our spiritual calling. And again we are fortunate because recognizing our spiritual calling is analogous to recognizing our sociological calling, our task in society. We can apply the principles in the latter to the former.

Schools nowadays give aptitude tests to students to determine their abilities and interests. In the same way you can ask yourself what are your spiritual abilities and interests. You can begin by looking at the lists of ministries in the Bible. These lists are found in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12. Then you can go beyond these lists. You may be interested in standing by sick people, comforting them. Or you may be interested in encouraging those in prisons to change their lives for the better. Whatever it is that interests you and you have the ability to develop that interest, that may be the way where you can find your spiritual calling.

Yes, you ask the Spirit. But in a sense the Spirit has already answered you even before you ask. He has already equipped you with abilities and interests in the spiritual areas of your life. It is for you to recognize these abilities and interests and formulate what your calling is.

The answer given you may change and grow with the years. Bill Bright felt at one time in his life that he was called to be a student leader in evangelism. This calling grew into being the founder and first president of Campus Crusade for Christ. A calling to serve in the prison ministry may expand to serve the victims of domestic violence.

Steps in Recognizing Your Spiritual Calling

The first step is to ask the Spirit about your spiritual calling.

The second step is to examine your abilities and interests in the spiritual areas of your life and single out those which you have.

The third step is to follow your calling as you perceive it.

The fourth step is to adjust, reformulate your calling as required by the needs around you.

These are the steps you can do to recognize your spiritual calling. And you will know whether that is really your spiritual calling because as you respond to this call, you experience an inner peace which you cannot have in any other calling.

Click Here!

Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:

http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth

http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health

http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us

http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet

Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.

3 Ways to Heighten Your Spirituality and Grow in Faith

Some things are so obvious that we do not notice them, we do not appreciate their presence. As the old saying goes, Familiarity breeds contempt.

The sun which gives us light and heat, the air we freely breathe, the water we drink—these and many more do not move most of us to say “Thank you” to the One who is their ultimate source. We take them for granted.

In the same way in matters that pertain to our spiritual growth we do not see the obvious. We invent ways and means which only complicate our path to spiritual maturity and fruitfulness.

Attempts to Heighten One’s Spirituality

There was a time in Church history, and this spanned many centuries, not just years, when monks and nuns flagellated themselves, whipped their backs with knotted cords, purportedly to perform penance for sins and imperfections, and to control their bodily desires. That was one of their ways to heighten their spirituality and grow in faith.

Again there were centuries when people in hordes undertook pilgrimages, also to heighten their spirituality and grow in faith. Today there are still pockets of these pilgrimages.

Whipping our backs and going on pilgrimages are complicated ways to heighten our spirituality and grow in faith.

Most of those who travel on the road of spirituality miss the obvious. They tend to complicate matters.

Go to the Sources of Your Spirituality

The first way is obviously to go to the sources of one’s spirituality and drink, as it were, from these sources. This means that you read your Sacred Scriptures. If you are a Christian, read your Bible. If you are a Muslim, read your Qur’an. If you are a Hindu, read your Bhagavad Gita. If you are a Buddhist, read your Tripitaka. Whatever is your religion or faith, read its sacred writings.

This is very basic and yet we need to be constantly reminded of this. The reason is because we can be easily misled to read other than these sources, and forget these sources altogether.

Every reform and revival movement in the Christian Church has always pointed the way back to the Bible. And every Christian group that sprouts has always claimed the Bible as its ultimate authority. A similar phenomenon has also happened among the other great religions of the world. They always go back to their sacred written sources.

The first way, therefore, to heighten your spirituality and grow in faith is to keep on reading the written sources of your spirituality: the Bible, or the Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Tripitaka, or other such sources. Reading these once in a while will not benefit you. You need to do this daily, just as you feed your body daily. You may read some pages, some paragraphs, some sentences. It does not matter, as long as you read a portion of such sacred writings.

This is so obvious as the first requirement for a heightened spirituality that very many people miss it. They think that it is so basic that after some kind of enlightenment they can proceed to more sophisticated ways of heightening their spirituality, like reading the latest book on spirituality, or performing some newly found unique bodily postures, mental exercises, ritualistic offerings, etc.

The truth is that the Spirit will always lead the sincere seeker to his writings, the sources of our spiritual life, the Word of God.

Let the Sources Transform You

The second way to heighten your spirituality is also obvious. It is to allow what you read in the sources of your spirituality to sink deeper into your life and transform you.

Reading the Bible or other sacred books will not benefit you if you read it just for the sake of reading it, to get information or even insights for a better life. You need to be quiet and still and let what you read penetrate your mind and heart. Just as what you eat needs to be digested to be of some benefit to your body, so also you need to digest, as it were, the Word of God to get the full benefit of it.

To do this you need a quiet place where you can be alone with your God. It does not matter whether it is in a desert far away from civilization or on top of a condominium in the midst of a bustling city, in a bedroom or a garden beside your house, in a Christian chapel or a Muslim prayer room in a mall. What is important is that you are alone and in a quiet place. If you own your office time you can hang a notice on the door knob of your office, with a sign that you cannot be disturbed because you have a very special visitor.

The purpose of going into such a quiet solitary place is for the Word of God, what you read in the sacred books, to sink into your life and transform you into this Word of God. Just as physical food is transformed into you, the reverse process takes place in the spiritual life. As the Word of God enters your life, it transforms you into itself, so that you become a word of God for others.

You start by thanking your God for the opportunity to be with him alone. Then you think about you have read in the sources of your faith. Then when you can no longer think about you read, you just stay there no longer thinking about anything. In this way what you read will penetrate more and more your heart.

How long do you do this? Twenty minutes per day would be the minimum to achieve some immediate palpable effect. But you can extend it to one or two or more hours if you have time.

The Third and Final Step

And the third way is perhaps the most obvious of all the ways although most people seem not to like it. Adam and Eve, or whoever were the first human beings, did not like it. Since their time, their descendants have not liked it, this third way. They continue to disregard it. But unless we go through this third way, our reading the Scriptures and pondering over their words in a solitary place are just a waste of time.

All the evils we see and experience in our world are the result of disregarding this third way.

This third way is expressed very simply in a four-letter word: obey. Ralph Waldo Emerson hit it right when he wrote: “The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey.”

You simply obey what the Spirit tells you to do. As you commune with him in silence and alone, he reveals to you his secrets, primarily more and more of himself and secondarily more and more of what he wants you to do. You simply obey.

That is all there is, to heighten your spirituality and grow in faith. 1) Read the sacred scriptures of your faith. 2) Let the words you read sink into your consciousness and subconsciousness in a quiet, solitary place. 3) Obey what the Spirit tells you to do.

Do these and in a very short time you will rise above the material elements of this earth and enter more and more into the regions of the spiritual realm.

Click Here!

Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:

http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth

http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health

http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us

http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet

Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.

3 Ways to Know You've Had a Spiritual Awakening

Remember Rip Van Winkle? Those of us in the American English speaking part of the world who passed our high school years in the 1950s to 1970s do remember him. He was the man who slept for 20 years in a hollow in New York. We knew him in our English Literature class.

For the younger generation who know nothing about Rip Van Winkle, here is a very brief summary. He was the principal character in Washington Irving’s story “Rip Van Winkle.” He was a Dutch American who did not want to work for a fee. He just wanted to play. One day he was lost in the mountains of New York as it was then before the American Revolution and got into the company of the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew. He drank their drink and fell asleep. He woke up only after 20 years, with a long beard and an aged man. He goes back to his village only to discover it was no longer the same as he left it. America was now independent from Great Britain. After some searching he discovered his family.

The reason why I started with the story of Rip Van Winkle is because he illustrates the person who sleeps for many years, who is awakened only after sleeping those many years, that is, in his body, the physical life.

In the spiritual life, like Rip Van Winkle most people are asleep and unless somebody wakes them up they will continue on sleeping spiritually, perhaps for the rest of their life. Some of them will wake up only in eternity.

Here are 3 ways to know you’ve had a spiritual awakening. If you have not gone through these 3 ways, this means that you are still asleep, that is, spiritually, like Rip Van Winkle physically, and it’s time for you to wake up.

Difference Between Spiritual and Physical Awakening

And that is the difference between spiritual awakening and physical awakening. You cannot know that you are physically awake if you are asleep. You cannot know that you are awake while you are still sleeping. But you can know that you have not yet awakened spiritually. How? By reflecting on your life, whether any of these ways are present in your life. If they are not yet present, then it means that you have not yet awakened spiritually. Knowing this you can now desire to awaken spiritually. And desiring to awaken spiritually is the step before actually awakening spiritually.

Fortunately, the ways to know we’ve had a spiritual awakening are similar to the ways to know we’ve had a physical awakening.

Awareness of Invisible Realities Around You

The first way to know that you are physically awake is by being aware of your surrounding, at first indistinctly, then little by little, more distinctly.

Even before you open your eyes you can know that you are already awake, that you are still in bed, that it is late in the night or early in the morning, etc.

Even so in spiritual awakening you are aware of the spiritual or invisible realities around you. You are aware that you are in a world of spiritual as well as physical realities. Again, as in physical awakening, this awareness is at first indistinct, but as time goes on and as you proceed in our spiritual journey this awareness becomes clearer and clearer.

This awareness of spiritual realities around you may result as a consequence of a dissatisfaction with your present job, of a failure in business, of a loss of a loved one, of a joyful encounter with a beloved. Whatever it is that triggers this awareness, you are made aware that not only physical, visible things surround you but also spiritual, non-visible things, like love or fear, inner peace or turmoil, joy or confusion.

Have you had this experience? If you have, then you have begun to awaken spiritually.

In physical awakening, after being aware of your surrounding the natural thing to do is to open your eyes and you see things around: the fading darkness or the onrush of sunlight, the furniture around the room, the light switch, the door, etc.

Awareness of Spiritual Forces in Struggle

So also in spiritual awakening you open your spiritual eyes and perceive the spiritual realities around you: the strivings of human beings to improve their lives and seek ultimate happiness, the crimes committed in the search for some kind of satisfaction, the exultation and joys of those who succeed in their endeavors, the struggle between good and evil occurring before your very eyes.

Do you perceive these spiritual realities around you? Beneath the stories of sordid crimes and wars, of natural and man-made calamities, do you see the mighty spiritual forces claiming for your attention? Do you see the ever increasing hordes of human beings who are digging deeper into poverty and homelessness? Do you see the few elite masters of this planet earth who continue to acquire resources beyond their consumption and just waste them away? And do you see these events as part of a spiritual battle between the invisible good and evil forces of the universe, beyond psychological, sociological, economic and political factors? Do you see the forces behind our world leaders which push them to dominate peoples and exploit them? If you do, you’ve had a spiritual awakening.

Action

Thirdly, in physical awakening after you are aware of your surrounding and after you open your eyes, you act. You get out of bed, go to the wash room, etc., preparing yourself for the work of the day.

So also in spiritual awakening, after you are aware of your spiritual surrounding and after you see what is happening spiritually around you and all over the world, you act. You prepare for the spiritual work ahead of you. You do not sink into hopeless resignation, thinking you can do nothing because of the enormity of the spiritual forces around you. You act because you are convinced that the Spirit in you is mightier than the thousands of problems around you.

You act but you do not do so rashly. You do not go into battle unprepared. So also in spiritual warfare you put on the shield and weapons of a spiritual nature, completely prepared to vanquish the enemies.

Are you struggling with spirit power to make this world a better place for you to live in, even just in your corner of the world? If you say, Yes, then you are acting and you are spiritually awake.

The three ways to know whether you’ve had a spiritual awakening is by 1) being aware of the spiritual realities around you; 2) opening your spiritual eyes to the events of spiritual forces around you; 3) acting spiritually in your corner of the world to make it a better place to live in. If this has happened to you, you know that you are spiritually awake and you can now help others to wake up spiritually.

There are millions of spiritual Rip Van Winkles around you who have been spiritually sleeping for years, for decades even. It is your task as an awakened spiritual person to help them wake up spiritually.

Click Here!

Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:

http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth

http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health

http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us

http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet

Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.