A lot of people think that the answer to the first question, What I Do, is the same thing as the second question, Who I Am. What I Do was my vocation and is now my avocation. What I Did and What I Do now, to a large extent, are the same – I taught and I still teach. I loved teaching about the environment and how we must preserve or at least sustain it. I taught college-age students and I now teach adults, and occasionally pre-college students in Sunday School. It’s what I did for a living, and I enjoyed doing it. And what I still do for enjoyment. And I was and still am pretty good at it.
After retiring from my position as a professor of geology and environmental science at the University of South Carolina, I became more involved in church, religious and spiritual activities. During my participation in Cursillo, in 2007, I began hearing the phrase “spiritual gifts” being thrown around. A spiritual gift is something that is given to you by the grace of God, through the Holy Spirit. I immediately assumed that a spiritual gift, then, was something that you have demonstrated that you are good at doing, and if that was the case, my spiritual gift must be teaching.
As part of a whole series of half-day workshops that are offered by our church, mostly taught by my friend Carl Saalbach, I participated in a “Spiritual Gifts Workshop.” I was a bit reluctant to do this inasmuch as I already knew what my spiritual gift was. But, Lynn wanted to go and so I decided to join her. The workshop was good and I learned a lot. At the end of the workshop, we all were asked to respond to a series of 130+ survey questions, the answers to which would define our spiritual gift or gifts, or at least so said Carl. Imagine my surprise when my responses to the questions said that my spiritual gifts were, in order, discernment, wisdom, faith and exhortation. And the two options that scored lowest were teaching and knowledge. Well, I really didn’t know what discernment and exhortation were, and I thought that what I knew about geology and the environment were merely knowledge. I was convinced that the survey must be faulty. After all, I had demonstrated that I was a good teacher, and I certainly still knew geology.
That workshop was about a year ago. I’ve thought a lot about the results of it, and until recently I was still confused. I am now reading a book entitled “Listening Hearts,” a book about discernment, and the survey results are now starting to make sense. I already knew that What I Do does not necessarily define Who I Am, and now I understand that What I’m Good At doesn’t define my spiritual gift. So, I set out to determine what is discernment. One working definition would be “the ability to use silence of prayerful listening, so as to recognize and define God’s call for you.” So spiritual gifts are related more to my calling and what I’m good at being and these gifts are less related to what I’m good at doing. Now, it really started to make sense. My ability to discern is reflected in why I have had for more than 30 years such a passion about the environment , or in more Christian terminology “God’s Creation.” Very early on, I began to realize that it was my responsibility to take care of our Planet and further that it was my responsibility to do what I can to instill that view into my family, my friends, my students and just about anyone I come in contact with. That passion, then, is reflected in my knowing for a long time, that it was important for me to teach environmental earth science and take actions to reduce my personal impact on the environment. But I am just the messenger and teaching is just how I deliver the message. The most important thing is the message of the frailty of our Planet.
And maybe it is my ability to discern the importance of the message that makes my spiritual gift of wisdom more understandable. One definition of wisdom is “the ability to discern (there’s that word again) inner qualities and relationships.” I now see that entering geology as my college major and continuing to learn geology through graduate school and much of my working life were really not just my decisions. God was telling me that this would be necessary for me to become who I was put on Earth to be, and how to use my spiritual gift of wisdom. I needed to understand the relationship between how the Earth works (geology) in order to understand my calling to take care of it (environmentalism), in order to understand my calling. So now I know that I must do everything in my power, with God’s help, to convince others by what I say and what I do that it is also their responsibility to ensure the sustainability of this precious island home.
OK, so what about exhortation and faith? One definition of the verb exhort, and the one that makes the connections to wisdom and discernment to me is “to give warnings and advice; to make urgent appeals.” And apparently this is the gift that I use to put across my message that if we don’t take of God’s creation, it won’t be available in all its splendor to our children and/or grandchildren and we will be held accountable. But, I also have faith that, with God’s help, I can instill in the people in whom I come in contact the necessity to heed God’s calling to come to its senses before it’s too late and turn around the degradation of His planet.
