May 28, 2023

This is an idea I had while I was spending time with God. I just felt like I had something to write, so I wrote this:

I love getting presents. Christmas presents, birthday presents, you name it. There’s just nothing quite like receiving something handpicked or handmade for you.

Have you ever considered your life as a present? Life came in a lovely gift-wrapped box, your body. Along with life, everybody in the world was given a set of handmade gifts.

These gifts are known as talents. Yours might be dancing or singing or biking or even weightlifting. They come in beautiful packages, thick boxes filled with tissue paper and trimmed neatly.

Sometimes, though we might have opened the gifts and tried them out, words- daggers- cause us to tuck the talents back inside their boxes. We hide the boxes in the back of the closet, where they are often stumbled over, crushed by other items, and nearly forgotten. Every now and then, we find the box, and remembering those hurtful words, we tuck them away.

The gifts are blessings, a reminder of how much The Artist loves us. In themselves, these talents are good. What taints them is how we use them and what we believe about them.

The Artist’s gifts are our pieces to the puzzle that all are trying to solve. Life was given for us to discover where we fit.