Recently I prayed about what my spiritual gifts are. I’ve always secretly wanted it to be prophecy, wisdom, and knowledge—wizards like Gandalf and High Elves like Elrond possessed these gifts and gifts of the mind have always intrigued me.

Yet, it wasn’t until I was helping my friend with an issue he was encountering and tutoring an ESL  student who has been trying to master world history on her own, that it dawned on me.

Helping people. 

Helping people is my spiritual gift. It’s why I write, it’s why I’m a teacher, it’s why I’m often labeled as a grandmom and an old lady. This humbles me. All that money I spent on studying literature, creative writing, and English Education just for me to realize my gift is simply helping people. 

Like what? 

But what I’m learning about God’s gifts and his graces is they’re not given for our benefit or to bolster our ego. They’re meant to make God look good and to produce good fruit and works within us and in the world. Our gifts, talents, and abilities were never meant to be our identities.

For example, a geranium possesses distinct properties that enables it to produce flowers which brings beauty to a West Philly block and brightness to a tiny cramped room—yet that ability is not its identity. I waited almost a year for my geranium to bloom. Did its lack of blossom cause it to stop being geranium? Isn’t it still geranium even when its in its seedling state or when it is simply a cutting growing its roots in a glass jar?

I’m learning to surrender my gifts and talents in their rightful places—in God’s hands. As I lean into my ability to communicate on the page and my gift for relating to and empowering the youth—my confidence is growing, yes, but more so my gratitude and awe for God is growing as well. 

Elisabeth Eliot once said often times God’s will for us can be found exactly where we are. Romantic and idealistic thinking often causes me to believe my destiny is through some mysterious portal or in the next Technicolor adventure. But God revealed my gift to me, not out there in the great beyond but where I’m at right now: teaching high school to my rambunctious babies in Camden, drafting this post on a foldable table in my living room, walking down the street in snake skin flatform sandals while giving advice to a friend in need. 

Doing the ordinary small things of Christian Destiny.