connections

This word, connections, and variations of it, always conjure up personality tests for me, as it always appears on my results.

The college I went to was big into personal strengths, learning about them and making use of them. All the people there, students, staff, and professors, participated using a book called “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Don Clifton. We even had semester long classes of unlocking how best to use this information we’ve learned. The book talks about understanding yourself and how you relate to others and receive from others. Moving away for college is tranformative enough, but these helped shape that transformation and growth with guided understanding.

After you read the book and took the test, you were given your top 5 strengths, from a list of 34, and mine were (as they may have changed from that first week of college): harmony, responsibility, connectedness, discipline, and fairness. I won’t get into their indepth meaning here, as they generally mean what is implied.

It was interesting to see some of these continue as my office participated in a team strengths program recently, much more oriented to office place work environments and employees than student life. They used StandOut, which has a only 9 strengths, and you are given your top two. This time around my results were Connector and Creator. From their site, these are listed as follows:

Connector = You are a catalyst. Your power lies in your craving to put two things together to make something bigger than it is now. Creator = You make sense of the word, pulling it apart, seeing a better configuration, and creating it.

There is a trend, and it is interesting to note how I tend to see multiple facets of things and how they work together to combine into a whole, or a larger picture, or correlate to each other. My last post, beholdings, speaks to how I see the little things around me relate to my relationship with Jesus.

One area that I have missed recently, though I lean more to the introvert side of things, is connections with people. The image below is something I recently saw and it struck a chord with me, inspiring me to finish this blog post. 

There are so many ways to put things together – songs and sermons, nature and Scripture, children and us with our Heavenly Father, news stories and inspiration/motivation. I pray for the willingness to let the Holy Spirit work through me with the gifts he’s given, whether is the connections themselves or something inspired from them.