Gifts and circumstances

by Meg E. Cox

Recently I took two strings of beads from a drawer and put them on. As I kissed my daughter goodbye on my way out the door, I told her that the newer string of beads was a gift from a Bhutanese neighbor whose family had just arrived in Chicago from a refugee camp in Nepal. "It's time I use my gift," I said.

I walked down the front steps smiling, surprised and pleased at the timeliness of my own words. The beads gave me strength for a difficult day, and they set me to meditating on several truths about gifts and circumstances.

First: Our gifts are from God. When my neighbor placed the beads around my neck, her son-in-law said that they are holy beads, blessed in the temple back in Nepal. I am not Hindu, but I know that these beads are a God-blessed gift, bestowed in gratitude for a gift I had given her family. As for the gifts I use in my work, these too are gifts from God.

Second: God's gifts are beautiful. I tend to dress plainly, and I feel uncomfortable wearing jewelry because it feels too flashy to me. But if this feeling causes me to hide my gifts in a drawer where they cannot be seen, then it is an unnecessary modesty, perhaps even a perverse conceit. I know that I am burying other gifts under the busyness of family obligations. It feels self-aggrandizing and narcissistic to call them beautiful and to insist on boldly displaying them. But God's gifts are beautiful, and it is right that they be used extravagantly.

Third: It is an expectation peculiar to affluent people that we must have a job in which we can fully use our gifts. At most times in history and in most places on the globe (and certainly among the first hearers of the gospel), employment choices have been severely circumscribed by circumstances.

In Nepal, my neighbor's daughter and son-in-law were teachers. Her son-in-law's administrative gifts were recognized and rewarded in the school where he worked. Here in the U.S., as they grow accustomed to American-accented English and search for entry-level work sufficient to support their family, they know that they will have to wait a long while before they can fully use the professional gifts they so carefully cultivated. A biblical understanding of giftedness must moderate a recognition of the beauty of God's gifts with patience and wisdom—with discernment of the needs of the family of God, including the needs of each of our nuclear families.

Finally: Gifts are glorious in God's economy. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians when he was encouraging them to be generous,

I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, "The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little."

I gave a gift from my plenty that was abundance for my neighbor's want. She gave a gift from her plenty that was abundance for my want. We need not fear giving, and we need not fear receiving. Most of all, we need not fear gifts. They are how God cares for the world.

Meg E. Cox is a freelance writer, editor and book indexer in Chicago. She blogs at Cynicism and Hope.