While I was growing up, a strange thing happened. When I was very young, I naturally explored all sorts of interests, from ancient history to art to writing poetry. I’m grateful that I came up through a well-funded school district with robust extracurricular programs that enabled me to play musical instruments, sing, act, and swim. Some of these things I enjoyed more than others–most of my attempts at athleticism were short-lived–but my point is that I had chances to try, and fall in love with, a number of different activities. But as I shifted to late middle school and high school, I started noticing that the school system was quietly encouraging students to start thinking of most of these activities as hobbies, and shift focus to just a few. The ones I showed potential in. The ones where I had a real gift.

I opted to focus on art, an area where many an adult had told me I showed “gifts.” I understand now that this was intended to get kids to focus on a few showcase talents and extracurriculars that might make them more appealing to a college recruiter, or to strengthen the skills that might go toward their future major. Indeed, I did just that, and being “the one who’s good at drawing” became my whole identity. “You have such a gift,” I was told; but it was true that I “had a gift” only as long as I could keep cranking out new work with the regularity and speed of an office laser printer. It started to feel less like a gift and more like an obligation to keep making, to keep showing that I was worthy of the gift lest it abandon me. But what I didn’t know then is that gifts are not things we should have to continuously prove that we have, in order to seem more worthy by a capitalist metric. They aren’t tools to show others how useful we are, or to turn into a side hustle or grind.

As an adult, my passion for spirituality flared into life, and when I entered into a UU community as a lay member I learned to think of my gifts differently. I wasn’t limited by who I had been before. Nobody in my congregation knew me as “that one who can draw,” and so I was no longer confined to what others had convinced me my gifts were at other places and in other times. I sang in the choir; I planned and contributed writing for worship services; I served on my congregation’s Board of Trustees; I helped to cook dinners at our local soup kitchen. Just as with the extracurriculars I tried as a child, I liked some of these things more than others. But throughout all of them, there was no one skill that tied them together, but a way of being.

While my ability to create art might have been seen as a “gift” by others around me, in truth, it was a practiced skill, assisted by a talent for rendering. My real gift was not the fact that I could draw or paint. Anyone can learn how to do this. Among my real gifts–which applied to everything I did, whether related to art or not–were a broad imagination; an acumen for learning and observing subtle things; a continuous drive for improvement; and a desire to tell stories and create beauty. The same gifts that had been narrowed to only one channel were now empowering me to explore more of what I could do. As I labored and loved and grew into myself in my UU congregation, those gifts kept presenting themselves again and again with everything I did. These were gifts that had been given to me, which I could choose to offer back in service to the world.

Gifts are exactly what it says on the label: something we didn’t earn, work for, or ask for, but which we simply have by virtue of being living, unique human beings. There is nothing transactional about a gift. We cannot give them away; we can only offer our way of being to others. Our gifts cannot be lost to us through time or age or lack of practice, nor can they be removed from us in a way that’s permanent. A gift is not the same thing as a skill set we hone, or a talent we can show off. It’s something even more fundamental than that: a gift is a way of being in the world, which simply comes out of us to offer to all the world as we grow into ourselves. They don’t have to be singular or rare; they only have to be ours. If you have a certain way of being, of seeing, of speaking, of moving, or of relating to others; if you find that way of being undergirds everything you do; chances are, that’s a gift you’ve got. That gift might call you toward certain interests or skills, or it might marry well with a talent of yours. But to see the talent or the skill and call that the gift, is to miss that gifts are given to all of us, not just a few; and it’s often the easy-to-miss, subtle, unflashy or even oddball gifts that become essential ministries. Even the least “talented” person any of us can imagine has gifts of infinite value to offer to the world.

As we move into this expansive set of what it means to have, and to offer, spiritual gifts to one another and to our communities, it becomes essential to identify not only our own gifts, but those of others around us. When others recognize these gifts and can name them for how powerful they are, we shine. If my congregation hadn’t invited me to define myself beyond being “the one who can draw,” I might never have found out that drawing pictures was never the gift; it was only one of many ways that I could offer it. If your own gifts are making others comfortable in your presence, or noticing the presence or absence of justice in a situation, or speaking in a way that makes others take notice, you can offer these to the world in an infinite variety of ways. Black theologian Howard Thurman advised humanity to do “what makes you come alive,” and finding our gifts, grounded in our way of being, is one way to discover what makes any of us come alive.

So what, friends, are your gifts? What effortlessly flows from you in such a way that you can’t help but offer it abundantly to others? What’s the groundwater beneath that structure of skill you spent years building, to succeed in a culture that sees no gifts, only transactions? And what would happen if you tapped into that groundwater and created new channels through which the river can run?

I hope you’ll discover, as I did, that you are not only your skills and your ability to be monetized; that the water is abundant and nourishing when sipped straight from the source; and that when our springs come together with our gifts shared in love, all of us may quench our thirst.

Learn more about how Centering In Gifts might deepen your spiritual journey and transform your congregation.