Everyone has more than one gift.
Everyone.
But we judge our gifts based on very scary and silly benchmarks like glitter, popularity, and 'sexiness'.
Your first gift is life. To be more specific, you are alive.
This is not an offering of platitudes. Ask anyone staring at a death sentence. I've stared at a few, and that itself is a gift, but I won't go into that right now...maybe later.
What you do with the gift in your hands will determine what more will be made available to you...rather, what more will be brought to your attention.
Every gift you have awaits the moment that you display courage to use them...and it does take courage to live.
Before I do something as silly as leading out my thoughts with the carelessness of a bull let loose in a lighting fixture shop, let me reiterate...your gifts need your courage. Not your mentor's, not your spiritual leader's, and certainly not your associates and friends.
Are there examples? Yes. Living examples, even. I will share one with you.
Have you ever heard of a woman called 'mother'? MILF or unattractive, good or bad, house-based or professional...every mother had to discover the courage to experience pre-partum life and follow the cycle to post-partum.
What's the big deal about that? Everything. You may assume you were a gift but the truth is that she discovered her gift of courage to mother you...and that journey starts long before the delivery room.
She finds out that you're on your way long before she has a moment to decide whether or not she is up to it. The fear of miscarriage, of discovering that you may have be disadvantaged from the womb, morning sickness, the immediate change in her lifestyle...no 2 pregnancies are the same and each one is a whole different set of negative or positive probabilities.
Abortions have been aggressively promoted in the last 30 years because the fear that overshadows the courage needed to see it through has never cared about your income, marital status, the circumstances behind the pregnancy...like every other human being who feels cornered by fear, they too need to feel they have a choice, an option.
Sadly, I cannot speak for those who were chalked up for the DC&C...I can list a few people who were either meant to be aborted or were condemned by 'society' before they had a chance to prove their worth.
Mozart, *Hitler, Kirk Franklin...most likely some people you had contact with over the past 2 or more weeks.
This was my way of telling you that your gift is not an achievement, it is your responsibility to see it comes out fully...you have no idea how far it will go or how far it will carry you. Neil Armstrong didn't. If you don't know who he was, it's not a problem. He doesn't know or care who you are. He's already walked on the moon.
*Yes, Hitler. Should he have been aborted and there wouldn't have been World War 2, no genocides, no concentration camps. History is far more complicated than politics will allow room for honesty. Pogroms had been going on for centuries and his 'efforts' forced the Western world to accept the need to recognise and protect human rights (yes, the child in Mushin will argue that this has not yet affected his situation, but humor later).
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well -- Rene Descartes
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