Here we are again, transitioning out of a season where the secular world is primarily focused on all things material and into a month-long period where the “new year, new me” motto will once again prove its short-lived lifetime. The new shoes that you got for Christmas are starting to lose their newness and your holiday appetite has made sure that the plethora of candy you received no longer exists in insurmountable plenty. With the church having blared the message all Christmas long that we often find triggers so much guilt, to remember the “reason for the season,” our minds are free to wander from the subject of such a serious matter and back to our own busy lives. We allow ourselves to be endlessly grateful when God seems to be blessing us with apparent successes or gracing us with tangible gifts. With this recognition in mind, looking back on the past year, I have found that the thing I have least thanked God for, the thing I have failed in recognizing, is the greatness of my unseen “spiritual gifts."

We all have them. Whether we acknowledge them or not, spiritual gifts are supernatural gifts that are given to us as Christians by that crazy thing called the Holy Spirit so that we may further The Kingdom of God. These gifts include things like mercy, faith, evangelism, wisdom, knowledge, leadership, and many more. It’s super easy to let ourselves think that our social dispositions, personalities, and natural talents are things that have haphazardly occurred in conjunction with our own doing. In reality, things like a natural compassion for the suffering or continuous joy in serving others' needs above your own are gifts given explicitly from God, added into different people’s characters. How cool is that? How cool is it that we all have the capacity inside of us to do some real Jesus-spreading in ways that vary in each of us? I’ll tell you how cool it is, it’s SO cool.

I’m still getting over the craziness of what it means to identify my own spiritual gifts because of how well they intertwine with each other. Not only does recognizing what our spiritual gifts are explain a lot about our relationships with people, but it unveils a lot about our relationship with God. As great as it is to identify what our spiritual gifts are, the tricky part is learning how to use them. It would be much easier to ignore the fact that we all have these gifts inside of us, because it would rid of us of a sense of responsibility that God so greatly hopes we will assume. Doing so would be ungrateful, like telling your grandma that you don’t like those stupid hand-painted ceramic birds she’s given you every year since you were five. Sometimes our gifts can seem useless, they can seem trivial and unexciting. Not until we understand that our gifts are meant for sharing can we truly appreciate the splendor of them.

After your grandma passed away you learned that those “stupid” ceramic birds were given to her by her grandmother, meant to be passed down from generation as an emblem of hope. They were never meant to be kept by you, but to be given away. This year, let’s try to give away more than we keep. Let us try with great might to pour out our gifts to others in the same way that God has poured our gifts into us.