The Gifts you already have are waiting on you

​Maybe it started when I was a kid. I made a list of everything I wanted for Christmas. I received some of the list, some of it I didn't. But because there WAS a list, an inventory of sorts, I was aware of what came up missing.

I don't remember throwing any ungrateful tantrums. Although I was a kid, so it's possible I guess. But to this day, many decades later, I can remember certain gifts I asked for but didn't receive.

If we're not careful, we can develop the same way of thinking when it comes to the gifts inside us. The gifts we've been given to become who we were fully made to become. The gifts we've been given to fully contribute to the world all we are capable of contributing.

If we're not careful, we can find ourselves focusing on the gifts we've never received instead of using the ones falling asleep inside us.

The ones weary from waiting on us.

For most of my life, I wanted to write. Sometimes I was fully aware of that, sometimes it simply felt like there was a writer renting an apartment inside me. But one way or another, writing has always been whispering to me.

For many years, though, I never wrote a word. I always said I'd love to have a job being a writer, but since I didn't didn't have that job, writing just wasn't an option.

Then Elliott was born back in 2006. It was a rough beginning and he spent a week in a NICU in North Carolina. While he was there, I started writing updates on the hospital care pages platform to keep people up to date on his progress.

After we took the recovered Elliott home, I quit writing the updates. But then people reached out saying they missed my writing. So, for a bit I kept writing those updates.

And one way or another, I've been writing ever since.

I learned a lot of lessons through the earliest days of Elliott's life. No small one was God letting me know I have a lot of gifts inside me I'm not using while I'm waiting on gifts I think he need in order to use them.

Gifts that might never come...

I wonder how many of us have 'if only' gifts inside us. Gifts we'd be able to use 'if only' the right circumstances came along.

I have figured out a key to life, at least a key to my progress and fulfillment. That key is this: often times we have to create the circumstances to share our gifts instead of waiting on the gift of circumstances to invite us into sharing them.

How many people die with gifts that fell asleep and never woke up?

Gifts that might have lived on long after they are gone.

I encourage you to make a list of gifts today. Not the ones you are wishing for, but the ones you have. And then give yourself and us the best gift of all.

Start using those gifts like you never have before.

Don't spend another second waiting on the circumstances to share them, start creating those circumstances.

I promise you, our gifts love a great wake up call.