Gifts: A Hidden Treasure Map

A friend called recently. “My gift for discernment is telling me something is off about a decision made by a group I’m in,” she said. “I got up the courage to say so, but they’re all pressing me for a why. You keep telling me that knowing why something is off is not the job of the discernment gift, but of other gifts. You have gifts that come alongside discernment sometimes. Do you think you can help me?” While our gifts are not ours to turn on and off, mine did step up and help her understand her discomfort well enough to offer the group more than “This isn’t right.”

Our gifts working together made sense of what our gifts operating separately could not have. I depend on those with the gift of discernment to tell me when something is off about a situation, a person, place or decision. I have no clue about what folks with this gift viscerally know, see, feel, or sense. When they share what information they perceive, however, some gift of mine tumbles like a key in a lock and says, “Oh yeah! Of course!”

In our hyper-individualistic culture, some might scoff at my friend who can say something is wrong, but not why, or at me who can say why, but am clueless something is off until I’m given that information by another. We talk about gifted individuals as if there’s something special and different about them than the rest of us ordinary people. And when we do that, we disparage our own gifts and undercut the healthy functioning of our communities. They may have and use great gifts, but those gifts are also dependent on the gifts of others.

We all have gifts and all of our gifts are necessary and important for the whole community to function well and be healthy. Some people will tell us we have to hold certain beliefs in our heads in order for gifts to manifest, but they’re clearly not paying attention. These spiritual gifts, as the church is used to calling them, can be seen operating in children. Our spiritual and emotional and mental health makes a difference in how well our gifts function for the well-being of the whole community, whether we have any theological understanding of them or not. When we use our God-given gifts in the service of purposes counter to Love, purposes counter to the well-being of the whole, we will likely do damage somewhere to the fabric of our larger community.

Paul talks about spiritual gifts as he saw them developing in the new communities coming together after Jesus’ death. He likens the gifted community to a human body where our gifts make each of us function like different body parts dependent on every other part doing its job to make the whole body healthy and fulfilled. What part of a healthy body is expendable?

Every gift needs the other gifts. We may look up to those with the gift of leadership, but the gift fails without followers. Gifted teachers need someone who wants to learn or the gift is wasted. A gifted administrator, who knows clearly how to organize people and resources to get a task done, needs others to delegate tasks to. The gift of service—seeing what needs to be done and doing it—might appear to function independently, but without leaders, teachers, pastors, prophets, or discerners, this gift becomes over-focused on detail or sees the doing as the purpose and all that matters. If we don’t know why we’re doing something as a group, chances are good we’ve ignored or disdained gifts within the community that we need because they don’t make sense to us. Feet and hands don’t need to understand the work of the heart or lungs in order to use the energy and vitality they circulate so well.

I want all the information gifts of perception bring—discernment, knowledge, faith, wisdom, prophecy, etc. But like the friend who called me has found over and over, our communities are ill-prepared to receive gifts we ourselves don’t have or understand. We need our discerners to tell us when we’re off, to tell us something smells bad about a decision or a person or a situation. We need the prophetic gifts offering a plumb line for where God is moving in the community. We need gifts of translation to help us see and hear what our particular lenses might filter out otherwise or label as bad because we don’t understand it.

If we’ve ever said, “That’s so easy anybody could do that!” we’re talking about one of our own gifts. If we’ve disparaged someone who is not adept at the practical—and to us obvious—tasks of life, we’re simply judging another for not having our gift of service and making it much harder for us to see the gifts this person brings that we all need. We damage people and block God-given gifts needed in order for the entire community to be healthy and whole.

As people of faith, how are we calling forth and celebrating the gifts around us? How are we refusing or blocking them and wounding those who risk sharing them? I love teaching about spiritual gifts, and one or more of my gifts needs a question or a prompt, like my friend calling, in order to step up. If you’d like more posts on spiritual gifts, send a question or suggestion to imaginingthewordATgmail.com (using the @ sign). And we’ll see what our gifts working together might come up with.

My friend with the incredibly valuable gift of discernment is usually right on target when she can gather the courage to risk offering her knowing. She has confessed to withholding what she knows because of the response she often gets—the expectation that she should have everything in one package. Our gifts are a treasure map hidden piece by piece inside each of us. We can’t find the treasure unless we decide to value and lift up all the pieces.

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