Gifts, Prayer, and Thanksgiving

Doctrine and Covenants 46 on spiritual gifts.  Here are some unexpected points

• Ask in the Spirit according to the will of God in the name of Christ (vv. 30-33)
• Ask the Bishop if you don’t know what  your gifts are (v. 27)
• Ask for gifts with prayer and thanksgiving (v. 7)

On that last point, I think I had a genuine insight of sorts.

A spiritual gift is a miracle that is repeated.  If I am wrestling in the spirit and get a vision, that’s a miracle.  If it happens with any kind of frequency, that’s a spiritual gift.

Before you have the gift, you don’t know how to go about it.  You have to study, work, experiment, and pray.  When you first succeed at the gift you are elated and full of the joy of it.  After that it gets easier.  Eventually, if you use the gift enough and it gets easy enough, it becomes almost routine.  You convert the gift from System 1 — analytical, conscious, effortful, awkward, unpracticed–to System 2–intuitive, unconscious, effortless, smooth.  But System 2 is extremely easy to take for granted.  Like walking.  What keeps the gift from becoming a daily chore?  That process of consciously keeping in the front of your mind that this gift is a gift, a miracle, is called thanksgiving.

It’s just like ordinary gifts.  Before you get it, you want it.  When you get it, you are excited.  After you get it, its just another thing you have unless you use it and are grateful.