I need help finding myself is what many of us will think at some point in our lives. If this thought has crossed your mind, it is a good thing, for two reasons. First, it shows you are aware of things not being right in your relationships with others, life and most importantly with yourself. Second it shows you care and desire to be the best person you can be for yourself and others. Both reasons are indications of you being a caring and a high character person, and both are very good.
We as unique individuals are all sailing in a vast sea of Humankind. Invisible to us is that our journey is preplanned, and our route intentionally laid out for us. Our existence, and all parts of it have a purpose. On this voyage are experiences designed to make us more complete. None of our bad experiences we endure are negative unless we intentionally caused them. The experience of needing help finding our self is with our betterment in mind, as it was intended, forced upon us by God in our life plan. In other words, this problem itself will have a positive outcome. One common misconception is we are weak because we cannot seem to find ourselves, and others can and have. Since we have not, we must be inferior to others. There is a simple explanation for this. It further shows how caring and high character we are, since others do not have this problem of needing the best fit for themselves or they simply do not care to find themselves at all.
People of higher callings for spiritual roles in life often encounter this seemingly easy problem with sometimes great difficulty. Moreover, we can encounter this problem for most of our early life, not coming together until midlife because our emotional preparation takes that long to complete. It takes longer to earn a doctorate degree than it does to finish elementary education.
Now that we know the nature of what is going on in our emotional and spiritual world, let us look at a few suggestions on how to fix it and move on. Oftentimes of we have not had enough nurturing in childhood, we may be left with the question unanswered of, ‘where do I begin to matter,’ and ‘how do I fit in,’ or ‘what must I do to be important and accepted,’ or maybe ‘how important am I in this life’. If we live with these kinds of personal doubts, they will skew our decisions about what we do in our everyday things, leading us away from our intended place in life. At this point this error is intentional by God, for the purpose of making clear to us that something is wrong. The result is for us to find the error, correct it, and in so doing, learn a valuable lesson about our unique self, our giftedness, and become a much wiser person for it. That is how God works.
One side note here: God is not found just in religion, He is found inside of and interacting within the hearts and lives of everyone whom He ever created, in all cultures that have ever developed. Religions just made up the lie that you need a religion to interact with God. You do not need religion to find God because God is found and served in your uniqueness, your gift, talent, or interest He put already within you. Your own heart and deepest feelings created within, are your connection to God, no religion needed.
Getting back to our skewed everyday decisions. We have over time chosen the friends, settings, and activities we have chosen based upon answering the question of, ‘where do I begin to matter’. This has skewed our choices we may have made. When we do that, we are asking our settings, friends, and activities to answer our questions for us. That is a natural mistake to make. It was right for us to ask our caregivers for help as young children, so it should work as fully grown adults, right? It is, but only to a point, and for something as deep as for what we are searching, this approach will not work.
Very young, we may start out as a question, as a wondering about something, a wonderchild as spiritual people refer to us, at an early age. As we grow, we normally answer this wonderment and become a statement about something. We no longer are a question but a statement about that which we started wondering about in early life. What we need to do is to go back and find where we came off the tracks and lost touch about what we were originally fascinated.
These tracks, we will call them, are identical to the tracks laid out on which a train is to travel. The tracks are our life plan, laid out by God and we are the train engines. Our freight is our gift, passion, interest, talents, purpose for bringing good into Humankind. If we have no concept of what our freight is, then we have no concept of staying on our tracks to lead us to where we are to deliver it. Sound confusing? Not really. Who you are is what your gift is, find that and you find yourself. Did you have a passion about something, and someone told you it was not practical, not important, and not needed? This is a common tactic used by God to show you how important it really is, and to give you the determination to make up your own mind for yourself. Spiritually that is ‘seeing things through your own eyes,’ and God may be trying to teach you to do that.
Most people think a gift must be a talent for academia, art, dancing, singing, breathtaking beauty, public speaking, superior intelligence, or athletic supremacy, to a superhuman degree. Our talent, passion, or interest can be far different from that, and many times is more subtle. Just because it may be subtle and less noticeable does not mean it is less valuable and not deeply needed by others. This is what throws many people off in finding what there are best at, and they overlook their value as a person. Because they assume it, and therefore they, themselves are not important and needed, they look elsewhere and start adding things to themselves to increase their value spiritually. This is the coming off the rails part, where we skew our daily life decisions to increase our value instead of pursuing our interests, which are two different directions of track.
In looking for your talent, interest, passion or whatever else you may define your gift as being within you for Humankind, widen your search to include everything about you as well. Your personality, your outlook, attitude, and view on life itself may well be the gift God bestowed within you to give to others. Nurturing is itself a much-needed gift and few have this spiritual capacity to share it. Vocations such as teaching, medical care, being a housewife, caretaker of children and elderly, and roles in giving personal recognition to others are valuable everywhere. Being able to recognize the beauty in others and make them feel valuable are itself an important role in Humankind. Not all gifts we bring to offer others are in the form of a viable profession such as being a doctor, teacher, pastor, entertainer or politician.
Many of our passions or gifts are where our position in life is funded separately, such as being a housewife nurturing a husband or our children. Do not let the need for making an income limit your search for your gift as being only in vocational areas. Being who you are embracing your gift or talent will include leading you to the setting where you or your loved one will provide your prosperity. This is especially true for women who often have nurturing as part of their gift. In spiritual matters, expression of that which is within us will lead us to the setting where our gift or talent will be appreciated.
Searching to find ourselves may not be just an individual effort. Go back to your memories of childhood and parenting, if it was good, then recall how your parents saw you, and see that aspect within yourself. If parenting was marginal or non-existent, then a reliable outside view of yourself is needed. God never leaves us without help. Somewhere in your past or in your present setting with your family and friends there is a light of wisdom shining that you need. Search and over time this insight will become apparent to you.
Just for the record, this is an emotional and spiritual encouragement ministry. We are selling nothing here and are not at the present time even set up to take donations, and probably never will. Your healed life is our reward enough, and we are very pleased with that. If you want to, please share your strength with others in your future so our nurturing can live on.