Your Impact Part 6
April 23, 2025
Your Impact Part 6
In spiritual direction programs and other theological and spiritual schools, students are often asked to write their spiritual biographies. The writer’s life story is interpreted in light of their spiritual life, growth, regressions, and milestones. On paper, this exercise helps us see and understand the evolution of our spiritual understandings, realizations, theologies, and transformations.
Writing our spiritual biographies prompts us to consider the reasons our lives unfold as they do. Once we write the story, we see more clearly how everything impacts us, including the small and most significant things. This exercise helps us understand who we are in relationship to the Divine and to realize our divine selves.
What has had the greatest impact on your life? That question may be mind-boggling because many things affect us in momentous ways. Life has so many categories, like loves, traumas, losses, travels, health issues, relationships, finances, natural calamities, rejection, windfalls, endings, awards, and many more… So, it may be challenging to single out the greatest impression of all.
Yet when we zero in on it, the most profound impacts are those that trigger a change in our worldview. When such a vital perception changes, our thoughts and behaviors are never the same, and our life’s trajectory changes. There may be a domino effect that reaches to every detail of our lives, but it all began with an initial impact.
If you are interested in constructing your personal spiritual biography, you can use the following questions as your basic structure:
1. When you consider yourself now and the purpose for which you live, who made an impact that most contributed to who you are? What did they say or do that was impactful? How did you change because of that person?
2. When you consider yourself now and the purpose for which you live, what experience made the most significant impact in making you who you are? How did that experience change you?
3. When you consider yourself now and the purpose for which you live, what idea made the most significant impact in making you who you are? How did that idea change you?
4. When you think of who you are now and the purpose for which you live, what experience impacted you most? How did it change you?
5. When you think of yourself now and the purpose for which you live, what setback, loss, or limitation most impacted who you are? How did it change you?
6. When you think of yourself now, what competency, accomplishment, or success most impacted you? How did it change you?
Dear God,
I pray that the Holy Spirit reveals to us what needs to be seen. Amen
