Has anyone ever asked you about your personal spiritual style? Has anyone ever offered to support you in exactly that area, the area of your strongest receptiveness for the divine? Or has it been your experience that most [people] are so focused on their own approach to God that they believe it is the right one, or at least the best one, for everyone else?
Researcher Christian Schwarz posed these questions as he explained why he considers his study identifying spiritual styles to be important in understanding how both adults and children seek and find God. In recent posts, we discussed Sensory, Rational and Bold Idealistic styles. Here we add another.
The Sharing Style: A child passes on the grace of God through service.
Note the statements that apply to children in your life to help identify whether they may possess a sharing style of spirituality.
- The child strongly senses God’s presence whenever they show grace and forgiveness to others.
- Often the child’s prayers are for people who aren’t experiencing love from other people and/or God.
- The child is drawn to service projects and other ways to share with others.
- The child notices and comments when people do random acts of kindness in everyday life.
- The child expresses a desire to respond to the hurts and needs of people.
- The child looks for ways to include everyone.
- You can see the child’s faith grow when he experiences God in his interactions with people.
Discovery questions for sharing children:
If you can identify four or more of the statements above you can probably recall several times when the child connected with God through sharing.
The following questions may be useful as you seek to strengthen the area of their strongest receptiveness for the divine.
- How did you experience God by giving?
- How did you see God in other people’s kind actions?
- What does this show you about God?
- How were you feeling when someone shared with you?
- How does that connect with who God is?
- When were you able to forgive someone who wronged you?
Coming up: The Enthusiastic style
Adapted from The 3 Colors of Your Spirituality, by Christian A. Schwarz.
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