Spiritual resource to share: your spiritual completeness
In an endearing episode of SuperNanny (my new fav watch-when-I-can tv show), the nanny (who is enlisted by troubled families to fix them) works with a newly widowed mother who was forced to foreclose on her house, move to a much smaller home and pick up the pieces with her six kids.
What the nanny asked the mother to do was significant and moving. She drove the reluctant mother to her old house and asked her to share the special memories she had in that house. As the mother talked, it was easy to see that all that she loved would always be hers. She loved the joy, creativity, surprise and spontaneity of her family and all the activities that happened there. She would never lose those qualities and never lose those memories. She understood it. The mother audibly said good-bye to the house, which by now had become a building. Her life and her meaning didn't come from the building, it came from within. Then she was ready to go to her new home and amd move on with her new life.
It is easy to identify ourselves with a place. And it is easy to identify ourselves with other things as well: a person, a community of people, a project, a heritage, a movement. But when relationships change, jobs end, a movement changes course, there is this gaping question - now who am I?
Years ago, when a very loved job ended, I was faced with this question. The workplace had been cutting back on staff slowly over the course of a number of months.
During those months, many staff had to deal with the awkwardness of staying on while close friends and colleagues were asked to leave, and other staff had the task of finding new work while still providing for families. We were all asking the deeper questions - now who are we?
During the time that I was staying on while others were being cut, I had to go beneath the awkward surface and dig down to find my spiritual purpose and find what was unchanging.
The questions of 'why them and not me?" was answered with a growing trust in God. For my friends, I could trust that God is directing each person's path; that God, good, is the substance of their being; that the same attraction to good that brought them to this work will also lead them to their next step. No one is left out.
I reasoned that each individual is complete and whole, reflecting God in glorious and infinite number of ways. The substance of each person's work - like the memories of the widowed mother mentioned above - is spiritual. The divine purpose of each of our lives is spiritual.
So when my job ended, I continued praying along those lines: I reasoned that the substance of who I am and what I love does not change but continues to grow and attract those very activities for which I am uniquely suited! God would not make me in His image and likeness and not give the channels within which to express them. Ability and opportunity are coordinate ideas, both supplied by our Father-Mother God.
I am not a building nor am I made up of the things that happen to me. I am not vulnerable but I am the child of an infinite God, and am complete, whole and mature. And my purpose goes on uninterrupted. I can claim this for myself and for my friends - for those who have left a job and for those who stay.
Then all of us can understand the response to the question who am I and what is my purpose? and respond with "the scientific response: I am able to impart truth, health, and happiness, and this is my rock of salvation and my reason for existing."*
* THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST AND MISCELLANY, p. 165
To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.
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