Have you ever fallen in love with a song because it somehow instantly put you in God's presence? In fact, you liked the tune so much, you downloaded it to your ipod and listened to it over and over again. Then, because you enjoyed the song so much, you thought you'd share it with a friend. Certainly they, too, would be carried away in heavenly bliss.
I could fill a page unpacking how the friend only pretended to like the song, but I won't because you already get the point; people are, quite simply, made differently and often have different preferences.
If you've not figured it out already, the believers you fellowship with are, well, different than you. They often worship differently, pray differently, serve differently, and so on.
As a Christian, I must remind myself that loving another often means allowing my Christian brother or sister the freedom to be all that Christ has made them to be. Often, that means laying my preferences aside so that others may live (Sounds almost Christlike, doesn't it?).
"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
When we use the language of spiritual temperaments to describe our spiritual preferences, we are talking about how our inclinations and distinctions fall into identifiable categories, groupings that help us understand others and ourselves more readily. Gary Thomas, the originator of the spiritual temperaments concept, has described these innate spiritual pathways in his book Sacred Pathways: Discovering Your Soul's Path to God. He discusses nine ways to draw near to God: