Learning to humbly promote your God-given gifts sounds like such an oxymoron; doesn’t it?  However, my initial statement does just that.  Did you notice?  They aren’t my gifts.  I can’t claim them as well-nurtured or committedly-cultivated personality traits.  These gifts are God-given; planted by the author of my days, sown by the efforts of my child-like ways, harvested by a world gone so far astray.  If I yield but one stalk of grain, its glory lies solely in the undeserved faithfulness of my God.

Now I hear the whispered questions, “What grains of glory have you sown?  From what humble seeds has your faithfulness grown?”

The first of the gifts I opened at a young age.  It is the gift of faith.  My Father’s presence was always something tangible to me and it was that which sustained me through the darkest times of my childhood forward.  The second I claimed was of compassion for those in need: in need of a hand, a hug, a smile or an ear.  The third is endurance, strengthened through trial.

The strange thing about these gifts is God’s method of cultivating.  In order that my faith might grow, He walked me faithfully through the darkness.  Now which one of us would blot out the sun in order that our seedlings might grow all the more?

“when his lamp shone upon my head and by his light I walked through darkness!” Job 29:3

“even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you,” Psalm 139:12

Compassion is rooted deeply in my soul as a result of empathy obtained in the midst of pain.  How many of us would pluck the leaves off our healthy plants to grow compassion in them for those that have died?

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His pupose,” Romans 8:28. 

Through trial and testing endurance was cultivated, but who among us would deprive our plants of water in order that they might not quench this necessity?

“For the creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” Romans 8:20

Where is the logic in such madness?  “When I lay these questions before God I get…a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.  As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question.  Like, ‘Peace child; you do not understand.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed.   

There are other gifts I see, yet unopened.  It is with eyes of faith that I wait in anticipation for their unveiling but I am in no hurry to take them from His hands.  A blessing taken in greed, is a burden in disguise, indeed.