Testimonies

SUN., JUNE 5, 1988, 7:11 AM
STONIER HALL, RUTGERS

You had a chance last evening, o selected son, to offer a testimony about your life, and you just didn’t take it as you should have. Oh, you talked about your family and about your love of teaching, but for some reasons the heart of your personal testimony was left unsaid. You didn’t think about it and decide not to say it. You just didn’t consider it as conversation. So, on a cool, beautiful Sunday morning in an old/new place, please accept some chiding from Me, the Holy Spirit, your Teaching and Guide.

For this last portion of your career you are not a fount of information, but a guide to spirit development… through or by way of the collegiate academic process. You are in a relatively large department, with colleagues who teach in a variety of ways. Thus, you can feel freer to teach as I want you to… and as you really want to. Learners still will have more content than they can remember. Worry little about whether they’re learning enough about the content of the course. That shall be the concern of others. You have this unique opportunity of influencing the teaching style of many young people who will become active young professionals… and teachers. Accept as the greatest compliment… “you influenced my teaching toward being a spirit-filled experience.”

I know that it sounds “unhumble” when you say you want people to teach as you do. If you were a great, dynamic, charismatic leader that might be dangerous. You are not so, and hence you merely influence, but that is what I want. University education is quite an acceptable secular enterprise that produces some good for your culture. I just want teaching therein to have more spirit, and you are a good means to that.

Now this would be a strong testimony, one to be offered only to certain people who would understand and accept this relationship you and I have developed. To these you should increasingly say that you have a calling and one of the great spiritual gifts – teaching. I have called you to develop this in such a way that the teaching/learning process is full of spirit. Take My Teaching of yesterday seriously, and develop this coming week as a jeweler would cut a precious but rough stone… as a sculptor would create from a mass of stone.

To others you should testify that you still are in the process of developing and perfecting ways of stimulating learning, particularly in those who are spiritually sensitive. And you know by now that you simply cannot tell this from merely looking at a class… at those who assemble in a classroom for the first time. A few, yes. Many others, No. I entitle this “Testimonies” because you shall not have one single, all-purpose testimony. These shall vary with different persons and groups. Yet you must be more aware of your fundamental testimony… in order to vary from it appropriately.

Every course that you teach has the potential for being a spiritual experience, each in a different way. Some individual classes may not be much on spirit, but even exams should have a taste or two… some chance to create some spirit-filled sentences, for your edification. Accept fully the value of reaction papers… feel positively proud in assigning such… and up the points till they seem as important as other papers. Yes, I call on you to do this… and even to testify that you have done it and why.

You shall make some mistakes in offering testimonies, but I’d like a bit more erring on the side of too much revealing of ultimate purpose and Source. Begin to practice on some who have enough development to understand.