Discovering My Gifts

By Elizabeth O’Connor

The act of creation is always a solitary one. Others can encourage us to create. They cannot create for us. The man of ten talents needs the same courage as the man of one…. Surely, I reasoned, it must be the magnitude of their gifts that enables artists and scientists and inventors to go on producing when they are rejected and scorned by their own contemporaries. Now I am not so sure that the greatness of the talent has any direct relation to the degree of persistence with which it is developed.

When I become aware of my own gifts and give my attention to communicating what is in me—my own truth, as it were—I have the experience of growing toward wholeness. I am working out God’s “chosen purpose,” and I am no longer dependent on what others think and how they respond. The experience itself is confirming. The response of others can give me pleasure or pain, but it cannot keep me from the act of creating. I am content to be nobody because I know that in the important inner realm of the Spirit I am somebody. Through the exercising of my gifts I am in the process of realizing and communicating my own uncommon self.

We cannot listen and speak and work out of our own centers and at the same time give our attention to weighing whether or not others are approving of us. But the fact is that probably no one—not even the saint—operates continually from his silent self. One of the certain signs that we are at the periphery of our lives is our beginning to wonder whether or not what we are doing will be pleasing to others. Whenever we begin to act and produce with the approval of others in mind, there comes the haunting possibility that we will not live up to their actual or imagined expectations.

To the degree that this feeling takes over we abandon ourselves, and spontaneity and creativity die in us. We enter into the sin of judging our own works, of deciding what is good and what is bad, when our only task is to be faithful over what we have—to do the best we can with it and to leave the judgment to God. We do not have to be better than others, or live up to their expectations, or fulfill their demands…. One of the fears that binds us is our fear of rejection. We have our gifts wrapped up and buried away because we are scared.

Many of us have buried them so deep that we do not even know what they are. This is why so much emphasis is given in The Church of the Saviour community to discovering and using our gifts. The teaching-preaching ministry of the church is to help a person discover the gifts that he is to use in the creating of his life, in building the church of Jesus Christ, and then, finally, for his commissioning in the world so that he can be “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in” (Isaiah 58:12)….

One reason for difficulty in our lives is that others have confirmed in us the obvious or what they, themselves, wanted to see. To please them, or to get ahead, or to make more money—we then developed those gifts, meanwhile putting aside and forgetting the gifts which were neither so evident nor so valued by others. If our unused gifts have any strength or power of their own, they cry out for recognition—to be given a name.

This excerpt is from the book Eighth Day of Creation—Gifts and Creativity, available here.