gifts – Aspirational Adventures

Follow on from “Gifts”

I was walking the dog yesterday and thinking over the post I’d just written and my gifts – and how content I was with my gifts now. Note “now”. I had many years when I wasn’t content with them and wanted something “better”. Like many of us I’d worked out a hierarchy of gifts and giftings, of things I should be doing, things that were godly and things that weren’t, things that were worthy and things that were a bit trivial.

I wonder how many of us, or is it just me, have amazing gifts and talents but are not using them because we are struggling to manifest some gift that just isn’t in us whether to please parents, or to be thought highly of, or because we think “just” smiling at someone isn’t really using our gifts.

Having done work in schools and with young people I see how they rate and value so much. I’ve done amazing writing projects with teens who were in lower sets and who saw themselves as “thick” to quote one teen. Ok so they weren’t grade A students but they had so many other gifts and talents.

Too often, I think, we rate gifts on how much we earn using them, how much other people give us credit for them, how much praise we get for them from those who are significant to us. When actually we should be looking at ourselves, be honest with what we love – because that is generally where our gifts lie and where they will blossom best. I don’t think a gift will flourish is we are trying to do it within something we don’t love.

I think, again, it comes back to that whole freedom thing. We can be fully free if we are using the gifts we were given, not the gifts we think we should have and that we know we are loved just as we are and don’t need to change to please others.

This I think is true freedom, where true peace and joy come from, and where we are without fear to fully walk the gifts we have and not try to be someone else. If we look back at The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe each of the children had different gifts and each had to use them to the full for the White Witch to be defeated.

Earth Week

Pink cherry blossom tree outside Diane Woodrow's living room window — This is the view I had this morning from my living room window as I did my yoga. The cherry tree is back in bloom

I was very excited to learn that this week is Earth Week. Although, as someone else said, I’m not sure why it isn’t Earth Week every week because the earth is just amazing. But then I also don’t understand why we have to have a Women’s history month or a Black history month. Why aren’t these just history that we learn? But that’s for another blog!!

The Earth is amazing – however you believe it came into being. Without the Earth we would not be here. Everything we do comes from/about/because of the Earth. Even the things we call “man-made” come from things that were part of the Earth already; from the food we eat to the minerals that go into our mobile phones.

Everything comes from the Earth.

So I suppose we do need a special week and even a special day to celebrate it. It’s like I’m amazing all the time, and getting older all the time, but I still need a birthday when people can tell me how awesome I am. And I need my friends and family to have birthdays so I can tell them how awesome they are. But what do you give to the Earth that has everything? Everything I give to the Earth will have come from the Earth, which I suppose is a bit like the little kid who is given money by their parents to buy their parents’ birthday and Christmas present.

I remember when my kids were little I actually much preferred it when they did some special deed or act for me rather than bought me something. I felt it meant they knew who I was in a deeper way. But then my love language is quality time so for me those deeds and acts meant special time together. Even now, much as I love those special presents that are things I really would love but think are too extravagant to buy, I still enjoy that special doing more; that thinking of a place I’d like to go, doing a chore that I don’t like, planning something for me. My bestest birthdays have been when I’ve had both my kids with me and my husband. Quality time! But I digress.

So thinking of the kind deeds and acts I like throughout the year got me wondering about what to give the Earth. The Earth is something we treat so badly. We abuse it. We take and take and so rarely give back. We praise man-made things but forget they came from the Earth’s resources. We even badmouth the Earth when disasters happen like earthquakes, floods, landslides, etc. And we even talk of leaving the Earth and going to live on the Moon or Mars. We only have to do that because of the awful way we have treated the Earth.

So what can we do for the Earth week and especially on Earth Day? There are lots of resources on Godspace’s pages. But I think one of the most important things we could is to remember how important the Earth is to us . Maybe we should go out and, as we clapped the NHS here in the UK at the start of the lockdown last year, maybe we should all go out at 8pm on Earth Day, Thursday 22^nd April, and give the Earth a great big clap and cheer. Let us remember that without it we would not be here.

Maybe we could do more than just clap and cheer. Maybe, just maybe we could start respecting it?