Use the gifts God gave you

What is a saint? There are many ways in which we can describe a saint. A saint is someone who knows they are a sinner. A saint is someone who follows Christ and always lives according to his teaching. A saint is a holy person, and so on.

I want to add my description of a saint: a saint is someone who knows what their God-given gifts are and who uses these consciously.

Those familiar with the Stephen Covey leadership material will recognise what I’m referring to. In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey talks about our four human abilities. These are God-given abilities, given to us as humans more so than to animals. What Covey refers to as abilities, I call gifts from God.

Our first unique human gift is self-awareness. This is our ability to stand apart from our own life and observe it.

We can even observe our thoughts. We can then step in to make changes and improvements. Animals cannot do this, but we can, and when we do this, it leads us to important insights about ourselves. With this improved insight about ourselves, we are able to make better choices.

You will have heard someone say something like this before: “You know, I should not confront her now. If I do confront her now, I’ll just lose my temper.” That’s when we use our self-awareness. Aware of who we are and what goes on inside of us. This is a gift given to us by God. Let’s try to use it always.

Our conscience is another gift from God. This is our moral, or ethical or inner voice.

This voice lets us know deep inside that what we are doing, or the way we are doing things is harmful to ourselves and to others.

Our conscience is imbedded in us and gives us moral or ethical power. It is what aligns us with the deepest Gospel values and Christian principles. All major religions, maybe using different language, teach this basic idea. Our parents and upbringing shaped and formed our conscience—but if we do not continue developing our conscience, we may lose contact with our deep moral and ethical nature and so lose our moral and ethical power. Let’s guard against this.

Another gift from God is our imagination. This is our ability to envision the consequences of our actions.

Our imagination gives us an edge because we can avoid many bad situations and we can influence situations for the better.

You might have heard someone say about a person whom they have criticised unfairly or harshly: “I never knew she was going to feel like that”. But if they had used their imagination, then they could have anticipated how someone unfairly or harshly criticised would feel. Let’s use our imagination to make the right choices.

Lastly, we have the gift of our independent will.

This gift gives us the power to take action. Once we have our commitment right, our motives straight and our intentions clear, we have to act on it, without being influenced by anything else.

Have you noticed the independent will of a two-year-old? Once they have decided, they have decided. Even when you try and bribe them with toys or chocolates or a ride on your back to get them to do what you want them to do, when their mind is made up they use their independent will to execute it. This is a reminder for us of how to pull through and stick to our commitment to get things done.

The saints used these unique human gifts to transform the world around them. It is liberating, empowering, affirming and motivating to know that we all have the ability to do this. We all have these gifts given to us by God.