We had the pleasure of making new friends this afternoon.  Barry and Sandy live in Atlanta and are on holiday in Scotland and wanted to meet us because we are in the same ‘business’.  It was so lovely to meet kindred spirits.

Barry told us about a course in Spiritual Formation that he is running which includes material from a book called Sacred Pathways by Gary L. Thomas.  It sounded so interesting that the minute Barry and Sandy went out the gate, I was ‘googling’ Sacred Pathways and doing their on-line to test to discover my spiritual temperament.

Try it.  You might be surprised at the result.   Typically, I came out as having four top scores.  (I never could come down on one side of an argument!)  But I seemingly am a mixture of a Sensate, a Naturalist (hope that’s different from a Naturist), a Contemplative and an Ascetic (although that one sounds a bit painful).  Strangely, I did not score highly on the Intellectual! 

I can see that all that is true.  Nothing I didn’t know before, but it does help to explain a few pet hates.  I have never sat comfortably through very long sermons and that had nothing to do with Church of Scotland pews.  I know I learn best by ‘doing’ or ‘seeing’ rather than ‘hearing’.  And I knew that I liked natural, quiet worship on my own.  So it all fits into the categories that the questionnaire explored. 

I will now order the book and try out the ‘intellectual’ thing by reading it.  Watch out.  I will run a course on it in the autumn! 

You know, that was a joke.  But now I think about it, it’s a very good idea!  Any takers?

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