What talent has God given you and I that we have not used? Maybe we have thought it so tiny that we have not dared to use it or grow it. Perhaps you like me considered using it but then looked at what others have and counted this talent as insignificant in comparison. So, we bury it and spend our time and effort doing anything else except that which we were called to do.
In the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30), the Master calls the servant who did this with the one-talent entrusted to him-‘lazy and evil’. At the very least, the Master said, he could have taken a safe investment approach (and put it in the bank). The other servants who took what they were entrusted with and invested it, were blessed with a hundred percent return.
Sometimes I think, we forget that our talents are a gift from God himself. Our response should be one of faith and not fear. This involves taking risks using our talents to love God and others.
While our talents differ from the next person, at the end of our lives we will be called to give an account. Our talents are not given without thought. God himself has also equipped us with the capacity for investing these. Why then are some of us filled with doubt and prefer to hide our talent instead of taking a risk?
I have come to realise that much of my strengths are not necessarily the talents God has given me. Much of my responses to life and the world have been ways I have learned to protect my self and please others. More often than not I have been exceptionally busy doing everything but the very thing I have been made to do.
Why then is it so difficult for some of us to invest this one talent given by God himself? Perhaps, like me that is because it is a place of deep vulnerability. We must leave behind what is comfortable and safe, and enter into a space not planned for nor can we always control the outcome. We are uncomfortable with being a novice, with failure and with embarrassment. We have chosen to hide rather than take a risk.
God has both gifted and equipped us with the capacity to use the talent we have been given. We need not fear embarrassment or failure. Perhaps a few knocks and tumbles, as a child learns to walk, but you and I were born for this!
The world is waiting for you and I to use our talent to serve God and others. It is poorer for the talents unused or hidden. Imagine how silent the woods would be if no bird sang except for those who sang best. (Henry Van Dyke)
Will you join me this week in daring to use the one talent you have been gifted by God? The world needs every single one of us one-talented persons.
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
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