I love Christmas! This is a great gift of service to me...Clay hanging the greens!
How we communicate with our people is everything. Whether it is a husband, wife, partner, child, or your church congregation, it is important that we learn to recognize and learn to speak the same languages.
There is all sorts of research out there and ways to identify the different manors in which we communicate. There are personality tests that tell us how we react to things and how we process. There are tests to figure out how we work best with others, fight best and learn best. One of my favorite ways to figure out how to better communicate is through Love Languages.
I often try to incorporate a little mini lesson on this into the classes that I teach. Do you know what your love language is? Author Gary Chapman wrote a book called the The 5 Love Languages. He proposes that each of us speaks a love language from the time we are young and understanding how we give and experience love is a key to opening the door to greater relationships and more open lines of communication. Maybe your love language is Physical Touch and your spouse's is Gift Giving. Not knowing that could mean you are showing love the best way you can but just not in a way they can understand.
My love language is Gifts of Service. There is nothing better to me than seeing someone use their God given gifts to show their love by doing dishes, walking someone from their car to the door each week on Sunday or volunteering to give of their time to work around the church. Its what makes my heart happy and my life make sense.
The great thing about Love Languages is that there are resources to discover your love language, children's languages, teenagers languages and anyone's love languages. Ready to find out what your love language profile is? Click this link to find out now: http://www.5lovelanguages.com/profile/. I'd love to hear in the comments what your language is!
Sometimes it can be hard to navigate this with a spouse, partner, etc... How can you speak a language that isn't your own? Check out this article: http://fiercemarriage.com/how-to-speak-your-spouses-love-language-what-to-avoid#/ or the image below for some ideas!
Christ calls us to love one another and I happen to be a fan of anything that helps me to do that in a more meaningful way and with greater impact. Looking for a new devotional? You can even find one of those at http://www.5lovelanguages.com/tools/church/.
