As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I see a spiritual
director on a regular basis—usually once a month. This has been an invaluable
practice for me. She helps me to remain grounded and centered. I know those two
ideas are a bit vague and perhaps confusing. So let’s put them in layman’s
terms: she helps me to cut through the crap and focus on what really matters to
me. (The specifics of that particular question vary from person to person, but
I think everyone would benefit from sitting with it for a while.)
This last session, I walked into our meeting space with no
definite thing to talk about, no issue that I wanted her to help me examine.
But as she so often does, my director led me through a few steps of questions
and just pondering life. And we finally started to get somewhere. Somewhere
pretty deep. She asked me the very general question of where I saw myself at
this point in my life. And at the risk of sounding über-spiritual, I said that
I felt that I was on the verge of some kind of new awakening—a new awareness or
openness to . . . what? I still don’t know, which is okay. Furthermore, she
helped me to look at this precipice of sorts from a different perspective:
rather than seeing it as something that I myself have to move into, it’s more a matter of letting it come to me.
So as I try to keep myself open to what life might have for
me next, she encouraged me to think about another deep question: if my life
were a story, what would be its theme? Whoa. That one made me pause and think.
I didn’t know how to answer. A few things floated around in my head, but I felt
unable to grasp them. Finally, one of them pushed its way to the front of my
mind. Part of me was surprised by my answer, another part was imminently
confident.
Gentleness.
As soon as I said it aloud, it resonated in me. And she
nodded knowingly. I had discovered it—at least part of it. In a way it seems
obvious to me now. In 2011 our church was doing a series on the Fruit of the
Spirit from the letter to the Galatians. Several members of the congregation
were asked to do a sermon on a particular aspect that the teaching team and the
pastors felt fit each person. The one chosen for me was gentleness. Hmm. As I
prepared and delivered the message, I discovered that it couldn’t have been a
better fit. Turns out that this concept of gentleness is not at all the weak, namby-pamby
attribute that many people mistake it for. Rather, it carries the connotation of controlled
strength. One of the most apt illustrations I found was of a wolf mother
carrying her pup. Her jaws could easily crush her little one, but she carries
it so tenderly that the pup feels cared for rather than threatened.
I may go into more about my gentleness revelation in a later
post, but I’ll just say that I feel confident in uncovering the theme (at least
a major one; there might be others) of my story. And I think all of us would do
well to consider the theme as our own stories play out.
What’s yours?
