Your Gift Will Goad You

Yesterday, I spent about six hours working on an essay about Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. It is freely chosen work. Even though it is not easy to write in a way, I do like writing. Shoot, I have been writing Bierkergaard for a decade now....long after most of those who blogged at one time started, stopped, started, stopped.  Bierkergaard, est. 2007. Thinking about getting a tee-shirt made.

I was talking to a couple of my students the other day and asked them if they thought being "smart was cool?" Or, maybe I phrased it like this, "Is it possible to be cool and smart?" Almost like a logic problem. The guys agreed that it was possible to be cool and smart, that it is not one or the other. I shared with them that on the whole I was a good to great student throughout my schooling--and I got better over time. And, I think most of my peers along the way would have called me "cool." I was always a popular kid because I was an athlete yet my identity took a serious hit when my knee went bad at 17 and it took me several years to reconfigure. It wasn't a pretty and fun process.

I did add, in my conversation with the two kids, that I suppressed my writing gifts in high school, thinking that to be a writer was not masculine. It was an admission that I regretted not developing my writing talent at an earlier age. I think we sometimes don't really understand that gifts come to us as raw materials. Aptitude is certainly required, but so is a lot of effort. I have an unusually high level of being able to reason analogically and make comparisons between things that don't appear to be similar on the surface but share some conceptual relationship--it makes my writing different that way. I think it was developed in me because learning was hard for me when I was a young 2nd grade kid. I needed to really understand to get it. So, I dug deeper. 

With my writing, I recall writing an occasionally snarky and/or thoughtful Letter to the Editor of the school, the local and the Philly newspapers. Becoming a Christian in college, in a really compelling manner, re-introduced me to the power of words. I started to read again for enjoyment and even more than that; to try and figure out life more. I was pretty hungry for knowledge and felt like I had to make up for lost time where I frittered away my time on vain pursuits and empty pleasures. I wrote for the college newspaper and published two satirical magazines, the Snafu 1 and 2. My buddy Warren and I also penned the hilarious Wolf's Lair Policy Statements which were guidelines on some matter pertaining to the decrepit house we lived in at college.

Picking up a book is an act of humility. It is a tacit concession that we don't know it all. I really worry that our civilization no longer values the accumulated wisdom in words and books. Although I do like traditional books, e-books are great also. I came face-to-face recently up in Buffalo, with Les Miserables hard cover, at a bookstore. It looked like a cinder block. Intimidating as all get out. On my Kindle app iPhone I just read a little every day of Les Mis and currently am 16% finished. I recently slew Moby Dick this way. It took me months, but the Kindle e-book allowed me to eat the proverbial whale of a book in bit-sized pieces.

Here is a final thought. If you don't develop your gifts, they will goad you, like a truculent animal that has to be jabbed with a pointy stick to get it moving. It is not only that we have to develop our gifts, we also have to make them an offering to God. For the ego always wants to claim all of the credit. We are dependent on God's grace for  every breath we take so it follows that we should not seek undue adulation for our efforts and excellence, but neither should we dismiss them. Have a good balance and enjoy the process. Offer up what you produce without expectation of appreciation. 

If you like what you do, you have already won. Everything else is just added to the account.