Delores Liesner
Activating Faith in everyday life
How To Do a Spiritual Lifeline
Purposes of a Spiritual Lifeline are to help you write out your spiritual story – before your relationship with God, how it happened, and life changes after. It also helps to see if you have questions/concerns not yet answered, helps some to name or acknowledge growth or direction for life and ministry, and to recognize those who helped you along the way. My sisters Marlene and Marvel constantly encourage me .
Have you had some tough life experiences? Some tender ones?
Have you learned from those experiences, and passed along your life-lesson to others?
Do you find yourself recognizing others’ similar situations and sympathizing with them?
All of those questions lead to revealing your training to Be the Miracle for someone else’s need.
Here’s step one of a 5-step way to flesh out your heart-trained skills:
- Jog your memory – Draw a line across a paper. Add a peak for every a decade and write out one tough and one tender life event for each.
- Write a few words by each life event to describe a lesson, a moral, a blessing, a person, an object, a scent, or anything that rekindles the recall of this event and how it affected your life – big moments you want to mark could be physically, emotionally, mentally but especially spiritually.
- Now write the person’s name or initials that most affected you in each event, whether negatively or positively. Add the N or the P next to their name in case you need to remember.
- Now you should have a list of major events, negative and positive that affected your life. Next to the event you should have the person’s name or initials that most touched you through that experience and an N for negative effect or P for positive effect.
- For all the positive highlights it’s time to say thanks! Even if you have done it before, send a brief note saying you were thinking of life highlights and they came to mind. It is always a joy to find a cheerful note among the bills!
- For all the negative – make a list on a separate paper and looking at Philippians 4:8 write next to each negative incident something you learned from the circumstance or something you were able to later know compassion about for someone else, or something about God and./or someone who helped you through it. Here is your list from the Amplified Bible – Amplified (Revised): Finally, believers,
- whatever is true
- whatever is honorable and worthy of respect
- whatever is right and confirmed by God’s word
- whatever is pure and wholesome
- whatever is lovely and brings peace
- whatever is admirable and of good repute
- if there is any excellence
- if there is anything worthy of praise,
- think continually on these things [center your mind on them, and implant them in your heart].
Thinking on the good results, or the good support can help you redeem the bad situations. Hopefully from that day forward all your highlights on the spiritual lifeline will have positive results!
If you find this exercise helpful, you can later add to it with more specific dates and events, rather than time periods.
Who did you find important on your spiritual lifeline?
Be the Miracle! – with journaling pages
Delores Liesner: Author
American Christian Fiction Writers Association
Delores Liesner 