Everything I Need to Know I Can Learn By Watching Animal Planet

Watch enough episodes of Animal Planet and it becomes abundantly clear that God has endowed every creature with the innate ability to care for itself in its natural environment. Take lion cubs. As cubs they frolic, chasing dragonflies and mice -- their play teaching them skills that will later transform them into the greatest mammal predator.

If this is the case with animals, it must certainly be true of humans, the most highly evolved mammal (despite our destructive behavior). I believe that our childhood pastimes provide clues that can direct us toward our spiritual Purpose. The activities we naturally gravitated to as children provide signs about our God-given gifts. These, I believe, are the human equivalent to a lion cub’s instinct to hunt -- the unique tools God has given each person to help them take care of and provide for themselves. Stated more primitively: our gifts are our survival weapons. 

A recent trip through my baby book drove this home to me on a very deep level. Under Best Loved Toys, my mother had written: "White teddy bear. Books. Nursery rhyme records. Singing and 'writing.' Happiest with books, or pencil and paper."  

All throughout my youth I was constantly drawing or writing. That changed when college-application time arrived and my well-meaning father informed me that he couldn't afford to pay for me to study something that wouldn't land me a job. Not knowing any creative professionals and believing my father knew best (and he did have my best interests at heart as well as expertise on his era), I thought his advice was just "how it was" so studied other subjects instead. However, to this day I can draw accurately and with ease and writing has always come easy to me. 

Only after intense soul-searching during my late-20s and early 30's did I return to the person I always was -- the person, I believe, that God always intended me to be -- but stronger and more knowledgeable as a result of my circuitous journey.

We often don't nurture our natural abilities. Instead, most of us attend schools whose structure was originally intended to produce manufacturing workers for the repetitive labor capitalism once required. No wonder then that as adults we look for jobs that pay well and provide us with so-called security -- I don't know many people who feel secure in their good jobs these days -- not realizing that the true security lies within ourselves -- in who God made us to be. 

Moreover, society teaches us to "be like Mike" and "keep up with the Joneses" -- to shop at Walmart, Old Navy and the shortlist of chain stores that increasingly pepper our malls and landscape, making life more convenient in some ways but simultaneously lessening our creativity and self expression.

I believe that imitating someone else or trying to be less like your Self is equivalent to dropping a lion in the middle of the ocean. The king of the jungle will flounder and eventually drown, just as over time you will probably feel dissatisfied, stressed out and perhaps even become ill. By giving up our individuality, we lose power.

But return that lion to its natural habitat and, after re-acclimating itself and, in the process, strengthening its muscles, it regains its footing and power. The same with humans. We can find the security that may elude us at work by developing our gifts and talents, in the process strengthening the emotional and spiritual muscles that accompany them. 

Hilary