The Gift in You: Discovering New Life Through Gifts Hidden in Your Mind (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR:
{OPERATING IN YOUR GIFT}

Operating in your gift allows you to choose love and not fear. God has hardwired your gift. We all seek for others to understand us, but what most of us don't realize is that no one else can understand us until we understand who we are created to be.

When you find a problem you can uniquely solve, when you understand your gift and its structure and operate in it, you then find your truth-value, who you were created to be. You move beyond yourself into serving others. You will find peace in the image you were likened after. You will find peace in belonging and begin making a difference as one of the created pieces of the puzzle.

When you are truly fulfilled and at peace, when you know who you are in Christ, He can use you to help others find their fit in the puzzle. This is love.

Deep inside us is the awareness of self, the awareness of our higher calling, and the desire to be understood. Our cry as we go through life is, "Does anyone out there understand me?" When we operate out of fear of rejection, fear of pain and fear of abuse, we cannot believe anyone wants to understand us; our fears work to thwart the desire for love and acceptance God hardwired inside of each of us.

Science has shown that fear rewires our brains in a negative direction, destroying our truth-value and blocking our gifts. This leads to toxic thoughts, toxic attitudes and toxic lives.
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Too often we seek an answer in other places when we should be looking to our creator. He created you as a thinking being - the science of thought shows us the material evidence of this fact. Expanding on the science of thought is the magnificence of the gift knitted into you, the gift that sets you apart for a special work. God said, "I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb. Before you were born I set you apart . . ." (Jeremiah 1:5 NLT). Spiritually and scientifically, you were no accident of fate. You were specifically designed and created with love and in love to express love. Your gift operates within love.

Your thinking pattern is so powerful that it changes your genetic expression constantly and restructures your brain.
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You are the only one who has control over this, and you wield this through the choices that you make.

So, you are an exclusive "designer brand," one of a kind.
¹⁵
Inside every cell in your body is your full makeup of DNA. Studies of twins show us that even though they have identical DNA, they are different because they think differently. Their unique way of thinking changes their genetic expression.
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Wisdom has built a house; she has carved its seven columns. She has prepared a great banquet, mixed the wines, and set the table. She has sent her servants to invite everyone to come. She calls out from the heights overlooking the city. "Come in with me," she urges the simple. To those who lack good judgment, she says, "Come, eat my food, and drink the wine that I have mixed. Leave your simple ways behind, and begin to live; learn to use good judgment"
(Proverbs 9:1-6 NLT). 

When You Operate in Your Gift, You Operate in Wisdom

Proverbs 9:1-6 likens wisdom to building a house on seven columns, preparing a banquet, taking part in the banquet, and using the house. The implications are that wisdom and good judgment are built and take time to develop. Throughout the Word of God, we are instructed to get wisdom. It's not a choice. It's an instruction to build a house of wisdom in our minds.

Scientifically, the brain is also built on Seven Pillars, which, when used properly, produce clear, intelligent and wise thinking.
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These seven main areas of the brain were revealed through imaging techniques that observe activity in people's brains as they perform different tasks.

We will discuss these Seven Pillars more, but it is important that God's Word and His wisdom are the strongest foundation. Brain science is very clear on the benefits of thinking deeply to develop the brain's intelligence and wisdom. As a popular phrase in the world of neuroscience puts it, "Use it or lose it." The more you think, the more your brain grows, making you wiser and more intelligent.

The development of your brain is under your own control. We are not victims of biology or environment. Our brains were designed with an ability to restructure and rewire, to control our reactions to circum- stances and events in our lives, and to develop our wisdom.

You perceive the world in the creative brilliance of your mind through seven types of thought.

Although you are not handed a roadmap for your life, there are road markers to ensure you are walking in your gifting - love and wisdom.

It may have been a while since you last spent time thinking about your brain - not your mind, your actual brain. You may have even struggled with that in classes but despite your past experience with the science of thought, it is important you understand how the brain works so you can understand how your brain works.

CHAPTER FIVE:
{THE SCIENCE OF YOUR GIFT}

Your brain is made of nerve cells, a hundred billion more or less, and each cell looks like a tree with a central cell body and branches.18 Every thought makes up one of these nerve cells, with memories and
oher
information growing off of it - the branches of the tree. For every "thought tree" you have in the left side of your brain, you have a duplicate, a mirror image, in the right side.
¹⁷

God's design of how we store information is so inspiring. On the left side of your brain you draw on details to form the big picture, while on the right you draw from the big picture to find the details. So the same information is processed in two different ways, on both sides of your brain.

That means, in order to understand something and build a stable memory that augments intelligence, the two mirror images of the same "thought tree" have to communicate with one another. The right side of the brain must communicate with the left side of the brain; both sides of the brain must work in harmony, or in synergy, with each other, which means God designed you and your brain for intellectual depth. The more branches you grow on these nerve cells and the more they communicate with each other, the more intelligent you become.
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Neuron Forest

When you operate in your gifting, these branches are able to form more easily, because your brain is working the way it was wired to support your gift. The way you process information, the way you problem solve, the way you use your unique insight - these are integral components to your gift and cannot be separated. (We will discover the structure of your gift in Part Two.)

Einstein is one of my favorite examples of someone who harnessed the ability of his gift, developed his gifting, and worked with how his brain was wired to benefit us all with the great advances he achieved.
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As you may already know, Einstein only learned to speak at three years of age, yet he was one of the greatest scientific minds in history. In 1905, Einstein's "miracle year," he revolutionized the concepts of physics and electromagnetism, and his equation e=mc2 is probably the most well known in the world. He made headlines all his life, even after his death in 1955.
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Although Einstein encouraged others to pursue their unique gifts during his lifetime, interestingly, we have also learned a great deal from his death about how each one of us is gifted. In a morbid detail, the doctor who performed Einstein's autopsy, Dr. Thomas Harvey of Princeton Hospital, stole his brain.
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Can you imagine? He sectioned Einstein's brain and preserved it. Believing it would reveal the secrets of genius, he never gave up on this belief his whole life. He sent slivers of the brain to doctors and scientists around the world who he believed would help in this endeavor. Eventually, he donated the brain back to science to be examined and studied. Einstein's brain now resides at Princeton Hospital under the watchful eye of Dr. Elliot Krauss.

What began then, and is still continuing now, is this search for the mystery of genius. As you can imagine, some interesting discoveries were made. In 1985, Dr. Marion Diamond at UCLA found that Einstein's brain had a higher ratio of
glial
cells to neural cells. Considering a
glial
cell supports and provides nutrition and housekeeping for the neurons in the brain, the theory goes that the more
glial
cells there are, the more thinking activity has been going on and the harder the brain has been working. She specifically noted that there were a larger amount of
glial
cells in the left parietal cortex (top sides of the brain that process sensory information, spatial orientation, logic, mathematical ability, spatial reasoning and three-dimensional visualization).
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Then in 1996, Dr. Sandra
Witelson
at
MacMaster
University in Ontario studied a few sections that Harvey gave her and discovered that Einstein did indeed have a larger parietal lobe and that the neurons were packed closely together, enabling them to communicate faster than normal, which may have contributed to Einstein's quick and extremely integrated thinking.
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At this point, even with all the incredible discoveries about the brain, scientists don't know enough about the brain to ascertain with 100% accuracy what these findings mean, but
Witelson's
work is the going theory at the moment.

One idea was that the brain was compensating because Einstein was slightly learning disabled. However, with the understanding of the science of gifting, it is easy to see that these areas of his brain were so developed, not because Einstein was learning disabled, but because those were the areas of his gifting, areas which he had developed greatly with his work and discoveries. These areas of his brain he had developed with purpose.

Although Einstein never took the Gift Profile, it is interesting to apply its underlying principle to understand the structure of his gift. Of course, using someone we are all familiar with is simply an illustration of how understanding the structure of our gifts can help us understand how best to walk in our gifts. However, this is simply a hypothesis based on historical research and is not Einstein's actual Gift Profile.

Einstein used his brain and his unique and remarkable way of thinking extensively. He thought hard and deeply according to his gift.
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Einstein's own words describing his thought processes are fascinating: "Words do not play any roles. There are more or less clear images."
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This introspection regarding his scientific thought processing reveals a thing or two: To kick start his thinking process at the deepest level, logical, mathematical ability, spatial reasoning and three-dimensional visualization housed in the areas of his parietal lobe and occipital lobe (at the back of the brain) were engaged. These are also the areas where significant changes have been noticed in the study of Einstein's brain.

So rather than sitting in a classroom taking notes, this probably means he initiated his deepest thinking using his logic and visual/spatial skills. This makes sense considering he discovered the theory of relativity by imagining riding on a light beam through space, seeing the ideas he was formulating in pictures and then capturing these images in mathematical equations and words.
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But we will explore this in more depth in Part Two.

Let's just begin to realize at this point that genius is in all of us when we use our gifts. And as we use our gifts, physical change happens in the brain because of its
neuroplasticity
, which will be physically evidenced on a structural and chemical level in the brain. We don't have to find the genius factor in Einstein's brain and then try to assimilate this into our own brains.

Instead of trying to find the key to genius and intellect in the folds of Einstein's brain, we should rather glean from all this research that when he used it according to his gifting, he developed genius and changed the world. He solved a problem . . . a few in fact.

You can do the same. We would make lousy
Einsteins
, but we are great as ourselves.

Find your own gift.

Let's have a look at how we can begin to do this. Each one of us has Seven Pillars of thought - the foundation that launches our unique gifts.

Each one of us also has two primary areas of our brains where thoughts and memories are built. They are our top two pillars in the Gift Profile, which uncovers the structure of our gifts. Those are the areas through which you receive and build your temporary memories.

We can guess from the research that Einstein's top two strengths in the structure of his gift were Logical/Mathematical and Visual/Spatial. That explains why the connections in these two areas of his brain were so profoundly dense. After reviewing his life, it is easy to identify how he operated within his gifting.

This is just one illustration of how someone used his gifting to such great extent; everyone has the potential to do amazing things. Everyone is created to do something no one else can, and understanding the structure of our gifts allows us to discover and achieve that purpose.

Let's start by looking at these Seven Pillars and your Gift Profile.