Be in tune with your Holy Spirit:

My friend and roommate for the summer, Shaniese, was recently talking about a friend’s mom that is a major prayer warrior, and then used the term, being in tune with her Holy Spirit.”  I realized that this is something I haven’t thought much about.  I know that I have the Holy Spirit. I know that it is a part of the trinity, but do I know and am in tune with my Holy Spirit?  What does that even really mean?  Like many of my blogs, I am going to try to figure this out and reflect on it in order to grow.  My initial reaction or thought is that those who are in tune with the Holy Spirit are ones who look to the Holy Spirit for advice and usually know what the best reaction or item is that they should do.  It is also a person who can look around at others and know what to pray not just for themselves but for ones around them.  

In my past, I have written a blog post about the song, “Holy Spirit,” by Francesca Batistelli, and I have written a blog post about prayer.  I believe that this idea is similar to the blog post I wrote about prayer, but a bit deeper.  I believe that one who is in tune with their Holy Spirit is a person who deeply cares about prayer and believes that it is an important piece to one’s devotional life.  However, being in tune with your Holy Spirit is also being able to understand more and more of what God really wants to do and having an understanding and a better sight about what others need and how you can be praying for them.   I believe that in order to be able to really know what God is desiring, one has to be willing to meditate on God’s word and be willing to listen to the words God is wanting to tell you. 

I am not necessarily a person who is an expert on meditation.  In fact, for a long time, I didn’t think it was something that I should do.  Not because it was necessarily evil, but I thought that it was something that was associated with other religions.  However, there are times in the Bible when it says to meditate on the word of God.   For example, there is the Bible verse of Joshua 1:8, “Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful.”  This, therefore shows that it is completely fine to meditate as long as you are meditating on the right things and this definitely includes the word of God.  One will be more in tune with the Holy Spirit if they know the right commands and lessons that the Lord wants to teach them.  For my first challenge in this blog post for both myself and others is to spend time on one passage this week.  It can be a short passage, but it is something that you can meditate on, maybe even memorize in order to grow closer to the Lord.  

The other big area where we may need to give a lot of time in meditation is in prayer and our daily conversations with God.  I read a book called Meditation by Jim Downing.  In this, there is a discussion of God’s desire of communion.  “Communion, then, is a two way communication, an alternating impact of two personalities where we listen intently and then share intently with the other person; there is an actual sharing of lives involved.  This is what God wanted to do when he said to Moses, ‘I want to commune with thee.’ It was God’s idea; it was his desire, not Moses.” I had never really thought about communion that way, but when you think about it, God was having a meal with his disciples when there was the first communion.  To this day, we think about having communion, we are having bread/crackers and wine/grape juice in remembrance of the last supper for Jesus, but really it is like having a meal with the Lord.  

Another big piece about being in tune with your Holy Spirit, I have found, is that one needs to be willing to listen to the Holy Spirit.  I always struggled with this when I was a kid.  I didn’t understand how one could listen to God or listen then to the Holy Spirit.  As I have gotten older, I have only improved in this a little bit.  I, like many others, still struggle with this on a regular basis. My other challenge for you that I am also going to try is to make sure to spend 5 minutes in complete silence after saying a prayer.  I am going to start doing this at least three times a week and then it will hopefully become a part of my regular routine.  This will not be the thing that I am very used to.  I will not necessarily enjoy sitting in complete silence, but I know that I need to spend time in prayer but also spend time listening to the Lord and what he has to say.  Through our meditation, both in our prayer lives and in our daily reading of God’s word, I believe that we can all be people who know and understand and are, therefore, in tune with our Holy Spirits.