Making use of your gifts

If I could give my son one piece of advice, it would be to learn what your gifts are and use them to their fullest potential. Many of us are guilty of not doing this - we possess special talents but we fail to recognize their value in our lives. We fail to realize that our gifts can lead into lives that can give us great satisfaction, rather than working only for the paycheck and deriving no pleasure from it. I've learned the hard way, and only now am I realizing the path that I should've taken much earlier in life. Perhaps I would have gone farther than I have.

As a child, I possessed a talent for drawing. I could draw since I could hold a pencil in my hand and I started out 2-dimensional, not the usual stick figures that a small child would be expected to do. By the time I was 10, I was becoming adept at drawing houses and horses, but by the next year, I began to let my drawing fall to the wayside. I had discovered my gift for music. From that point on, I seldom, if ever, drew. In my teen years, I discovered that I was good at theater and for a few years, I cultivated my abilities in both music and theater, finding great pleasure, as well as catharsis for that teen angst that so many of us have gone through. Those two activities kept me sane while I tried to figure out who I was inside. I initially pursued music education as my major when I began college, but I lacked the drive and (at that time) maturity to go through the rigors of a performing arts curriculum. I wasn't willing to put in the time and energy for practice and study. Much later, I realized that I could also write, and while I earned a college degree in English, even this gift is not being used to its fullest potential.

Today, my gifts of drawing and stage continue to collect dust. I still participate in music through my church in the forms of voice and instrument, but I know that I could be much better than I am had I taken greater care of the gifts that I was born with. Instead, I allowed myself to be distracted by other things going on in my life, as well as failing to overcome my sense of impatience in most things that I do.

When discussing things we should've done, my husband often says: "Could'a, should'a, would'a." You can wonder "what if..." all you want, but it will never change the fact that you never put your best effort into the gifts that were handed to you. While I'm still young enough to make up for lost time, I still find myself busy with the daily grind of life to even try to make something of my gifts...or perhaps I'm still too impatient to take the time to work at it. At least I can impress upon my son that he should grab life with both hands and go for it!