Your Gift Makes Room

Using Your Gifts

“A gift opens the way for the giver and ushers him into the presence of the great.” - Proverbs 18:16 NIV

Ok. So I have been in Rome, Italy for the past week and I am due to be here for another three weeks. How, you ask? The short answer is God. The longer answer is that a gift I was given, I used for His glory and it made room for me to get here. Let me explain.
The above proverb is often quoted but I would say rarely understood. Partially because I think we overlook the gifts that God has given us. Or we do not attribute the things that we have as actual gifts. By definition, a gift does not come from yourself. It comes from somewhere else, or from someone else. According to Webster, there are three definitions for the noun gift of which I have chose two for the purposes of this discussion:

1 : a notable capacity, talent, or endowment

2 : something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation

A gift that you have is something you didn’t have to pay for and makes you notable. The good news is that we all have gifts. The bad news is that we don’t all use them. Several people have contributed to the funding of my trip to Rome. I didn’t pay for it. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the money. Most of you know that I left my job last year to start a business and attend school full time. That didn’t exactly equate to me having enough money to leave the states for a month to lounge in a foreign country and “Eat, Pray, Love” till my heart was content. That’s not what got me here. Obedience got me here. Obedience is a gift. I have the capacity to obey God.
A while ago, God told me to do something that I would have never thought to do and frankly didn’t really want to do, but knowing that God always has something in mind that I cannot see, I yielded and did it anyway. Turns out, it was an enormous blessing to the person and years later, a blessing to me in the form of the longest vacation I have ever taken. How bout that? But I cannot take credit for it. I’m not that nice. I’m just obedient. And even that is a gift. That person paid for my trip, voluntarily. It was another gift. So now I can use that gift to get exposed to people that I would have never had an opportunity to interact with, had it not been for the initial use of my initial gift. And had I not been obedient and left my job last year, I probably wouldn’t have had the time to be able to leave for a month. The way God made me has a place in me becoming the woman He created me to become. Your gift makes room for you and makes room for God to use you in ways you couldn't imagine. He is the initial giver and you give again when you use what He gives you.
I’m sure we can all think back to series of events that have occurred in our lives that came from one simple use of some gift that we have been given. Maybe everyone is not gifted to sing or dance or play ball, but we are all gifted with something. Even things that we overlook, like obedience. Some people are actually gifted in the opposite way. Those are the rebels. Even their rebellion has a place. I’m not a gifted rebel. I don’t do well bucking the system. I know my place. Every time I tried to do something rebellious, I got stopped dead in my tracks. Rebellion is not my gift. But I know people who are gifted in rebellion. Many of them are the catalysts for change. Malcolm X was a rebel. Harriet Tubman was a rebel. Rosa Parks was a rebel. Jonah was a rebel. That’s a gift. Maybe it will make you think differently about how we see the troublemakers of our day. Maybe they just don’t know how to use their gifts constructively.
But if we don’t look at our lives in totality, then we can miss the opportunities God is giving us everyday to use our gifts. And we can also miss opportunities to help others channel their gifts in constructive ways. We call people “goody two shoes” for being obedient, but maybe they are made that way for a reason. We call people troublemakers because they challenge authority, but maybe they are gifted to change the system that others obey blindly. We need both type of people. My obedience to God helped someone else in their time of need, and continues to bless others. Others rebellion can spark the change we need to revamp systems and traditions that no longer work. Maybe someone else is gifted in organization, but we call them anal. Maybe someone is gifted is functioning in chaos and are incredibly artistic. If we can all learn to see our little quirks as gifts from God, maybe we would use them more. Maybe those gifts would make room for us to be free in our lives in a way that we don’t yet realize. Maybe that freedom helps to free someone else. In any case, use what you’ve got all the time. You never know where it will lead.