Are You Operating in Your Gift?

This past weekend I had the wonderful honor and opportunity to speak at a local women’s conference.  Thank you so much to those of you who prayed for me and for the conference.  It was a success!  I continue to pray and believe that the words the ladies received will sink down into their hearts and produce some great things in their lives.  God’s Word doesn’t return void! (Isaiah 55:11)  I spoke about discovering your God-given gifts and purpose.

God has been really working on me over the past several years to show me my own gifts and talents and to give me a glimpse of some of the things that He’s calling me to do.  I still don’t know my WHOLE purpose in life, but I’m definitely seeing God reveal bits and pieces of it to me little by little.  I’m not sure if we really ever figure this out all at once anyway.  My sister told me the other day that if God told me everything He wanted me to do right now, I’d more than likely just reply “Heck NO! I’m not doing that!”  She’s probably right.  I tend to be reluctant a lot when God calls me to do something new that might be a little out of my comfort zone.  Sometimes I can be a little stubborn. 😉

I shared with the ladies at the conference that I’ve always said my whole life that I would NEVER be a teacher.  I’ve learned that you have to be careful of what you say you will never do because God has a sense of humor.  Little did I know when I swore off teaching, that it is exactly what God had gifted me to do.  Now when I look back I can see that it was there all along.  I just didn’t recognize it.  Unfortunately, I think this is true of a lot of people and their gifts.  They don’t know they’re gifted or they don’t recognize them for a number of reasons.  Some people have just never been taught.  My goal is to change that—at least in my sphere of influence.  Now this is something that I teach in both my college classes and at Glory House, the women’s restoration home where I teach.  I’d like to continue some of this teaching on the blog here too from time to time because you can’t start operating in your gift until you know what your gifts are.

Discovering my gifts and purpose started for me several years back.  I hadn’t heard any kind of teaching on it yet, but little things started to surface here and there.  In my master’s classes for my MBA, we had to do presentations in just about every class.  A portion of our grades for the presentations were based on peer evaluations from our classmates.  Almost every time I got my peer evaluations people would comment that I should be a teacher.  I’d often jokingly put my fingers up in a cross shape, as if to ward off a vampire!  However, the comments kept coming and people kept telling me how good I was at explaining the information in a way they could understand it.  I slowly started to entertain the idea that maybe I was good at teaching.

Then when I was approached about teaching a college class, those comments came to mind.  Even though I was extremely reluctant, I thought, “Maybe I can do this.  I’d be teaching stuff that I’ve already been helping people with for years anyway.  It’s just one day a week for just one semester.  I’ll get paid for it.  What do I have to lose?”  Plus it was a good opportunity to get out of the house for a bit since I was a stay-at-home mom.  That one class was all it took for me to discover that I really did love teaching and that I actually was pretty good at it.  I still had a lot to learn, but I had a knack for it.  It was very fulfilling for me because I started to learn what people meant by “operating in your gift”.

I truly believe that is how God intends for our gifts to work.  We’ll just have a knack for something.  We will love doing it.  We’ll also be pretty good at it.  And when we start to develop and cultivate those gifts once we find out what they are, they will start to bless us and prosper us.  We can actually find ways of making a lot of money doing things that we really love AND helping others all at the same time!

“A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men.” Proverbs 18:16 (AMP)

“A present [gift] is a precious stone in the eyes of its possessor; Wherever he turns, he prospers.” Proverbs 17:8 (NKJV)

There’s a lot more to my story about teaching and my others gifts that I’ve discovered, and about how God is starting to tie things together so they are starting to make sense now.  But I’ll have to share more about that with you later! 🙂

How about you?

Take Some Practical Steps to See if You Are Operating in Your Gift:

• Measure if you are operating in your gift. Don and Katie Fortune, in their book “Discover Your God-Given Gifts”, say that the best way to measure whether or not you are operating in your gift is to judge your joy or frustration.  They say that joy is the byproduct of operating in your gift.  Frustration is the byproduct of trying to operate outside of it.  When you are doing those things that God has purposed for you that are in His will, joy is always a byproduct.  Joy itself should not be the goal, but as long as you are operating in your gift, you will experience joy.  Are you experiencing joy in what you do?

“You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Psalm 16:11 (NIV) 

• Learn to trust God if you are reluctant in operating in your gift–Try this exercise… Take a piece of paper and roll it up into a tube. Now look through it.  Notice how your view is limited to the size of the opening at the end.  Now take the tube away from your eyes and notice how much better and how much more you can see.  That’s how God sees things.  Our perspective is limited, just like looking through a tube.  We can’t see the big picture like God sees it.  He sees all of the gifts and talents that He’s placed inside of you and what His plan is for those things.  He sees His full purpose and plan for your life and how they will play out.  You need to keep this in mind when you are reluctant or try to buck God whenever He calls you to do something.  You can trust Him.  He wants you to be operating in your gift.  He has good plans for you.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

Are You Operating in Your Gift?  Tell us about it!  Leave a comment below (click on the post link to join the conversation if you’re viewing through e-mail).

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