Holy Spirit Centered Self Awareness
I’ve seen a ton of arguments in support of the belief that people do not, and in fact cannot, change. But as a blood-washed, born-again Believer, I don’t believe that someone walking in a close, genuine relationship with the Holy Spirit can remain unchanged. In my thirty years of life, I have heard testimonies about, seen evidence of, and personally experienced the transformational power that comes with allowing who and how He is to impact who and how we are.
For a world that’s so skeptical about change, we spend a lot of time discussing change.
Social media is saturated with self-help and personal development gurus. For example, we open Instagram and TikTok and are inundated with inspirational messages about how to get more done in the day, hustle harder, succeed more, and get rich faster.
Millennials grew up in the thick of the hustle culture. We’re the poster children for productivity and diversification. If you want to optimize something, hire a Millennial. But our proclivity for efficiency coupled with the influence of social media means we also have a tendency to skim when we should be seeking. The deep work that true change demands won’t fit into those 2,200 characters that Instagram allows. Personal development, the kind that brings you closer to who you were created to be, can’t be curated for social media as easily as the superficial stuff. It’s much, much, deeper than that.
Walking with Yahweh is deeply personal, and you’ll find that as you journey with Him, you begin to notice the parts of yourself that contradict who He says you are. It’s true that we’re products of our decisions, but we’re also products of circumstance, and we don’t always get to choose those. From the time we’re born, we begin having experiences that reshape us, encounters that misalign us, conversations that interrupt the truth of our identities.
The human experience is an abrasive one – we’re buffeted and bruised on a daily basis. The seemingly small and mundane can have a complex and profound effect on our outlook and perspective, completely coloring the way we see ourselves and the world. Things like words spoken to us in childhood by frustrated or irresponsible adults, persistent taunts by peers, failure, family betrayal - the before and after moments in our lives that insert violent page breaks in our stories, the parts where we’re different afterwards.
There are at least a million ways to be injured in this life before we even get the opportunity to choose violence for ourselves. We may not even realize who or what we’ve become in response to things spoken or done to us because not all defining incidents are dramatically traumatic.
The Holy Spirit is vocal, and sis, oh His conviction. Walking with Him means constant examination at more than just the surface level. He asks questions that beg thoughtful, often brutally honest answers about those things that changed you. He challenges us in a way that makes the skewed parts of us shake, and break, rip, and bow in response. His probing is always purposeful, and He exposes to help us heal. But relationship with Him demands maturity, growth, humility, transparency, and progress.
This is the way I define personal development: a collaborative process between me and the Holy Spirit in which I choose to engage the parts of me that are misaligned in response to His prompting.
We can work away in the fields of our own hearts for sure, but there are some things only He knows, hiding places only He can find. There are aspects of our personhoods that have been so deeply deformed by our lived experiences that we may not even know what our healed versions look like. We need His insight, His wisdom, His grace to examine ourselves thoroughly. Personal development from the purpose perspective is about more than just glowing up for the Gram, it’s about maturing for the part you play in the Kingdom, and that work is messy, painful, takes significant trust and a lifetime. But it’s the most worth it work you’ll ever do.