Recently my wife and I went out for lunch with a very good friend of mine. While we were sitting at our table enjoying our meal, two ladies with prams came in and sat at a table behind us. A short while after this, one of the prams fell backwards tipping up the youngster in the pram and throwing bags of shopping onto the floor. In an instant my good friend moved out of his chair and assisted the lady in lifting the pram back up off the floor and setting things straight. At precisely the same moment, my wife who was furthest away from the action, instantly breathed out a compassionate groan and looked intently towards the woman with understanding and sympathy in the hope that they were all okay. I, on the other hand, who had also witnessed exactly the same situation unfold, sat glued to my seat thinking “the pram fell over because there was too much weight in the shopping bags that should have never been hung on the handles of the pram in the first place.!!!”
All three of us faced exactly the same circumstance.... all three of us reacted differently. My good friend, always the servant and ready to help and assist was instantly prepared to serve. My wife, always understanding and ready to empathise with anothers feelings immediately offered sympathetic concern. And me, ever the teacher, sat glued to my seat analysing why things went wrong and thinking of ways to improve the situation.
In 1 Corinthians 12:29, the Apostle Paul writes....”Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?”
It is a rhetorical question and of course the resounding answer is a very loud NO.!!
We are all different. We all have our strengths and we all have our weaknesses. We all have different giftings and we all have different ways of expressing those giftings. Our capacity to excel in what we do is often only limited by our feelings of inadequacy due to the fact that we so readily notice the abilities of others and do not recognise our own. We often wrongly compare our own ability to the ability of another who has an entirely different gifting, and then consider our own strengths to be of no value. The apostle Paul makes it very clear.... we are not all the same... and we should not make these unhelpful comparisons.
Go and be yourself... excel at what you do... do it well... and express joyfully the gifts and the abilities that God has given you.
