Talent

Okay so let’s talk about talent.

So this morning I got up to make myself some food, because I woke up hungry. I had some marinated chicken wings in the fridge from yesterday. While making the food I started to think of something God told me earlier in the year, and that He’s repeated a couple times in different ways since last year. “Don’t say yes to everything. Say No! Saying no gives you focus, discipline, structure and gives your neighbor an opportunity to say yes to what you said no to. Your no is someone else’s yes, and if you stop trying to be everything, then someone else can be something.”

Deep fried buttermilk chicken wings and potato chips

The reason I started to think about this is because I’m blessed with many talents and gifts, both spiritual and natural, and I was thinking about cooking and how it was pretty much my first creative love. Some of my earliest memories are of hiding in the top cupboards in my house, (yes I would climb in them, lol) and reading fancy cookbooks my mother had. I remember trying to fry rice in oil as a young girl, and my dad scolding me and telling me not to go near his gas cooker. In fact I have this massive scar that’s barely visible on my leg from hot oil, because I was in the kitchen with one of my nannies doing heaven knows what at 7/8 years old.

You cannot imagine how much God had to convince me to drop it and let it go, because I may love it, and it comes naturally to me, but it’s not what He’s called me to do.

“Don’t say yes to everything. Say No! Saying no gives you focus, discipline, structure and gives your neighbor an opportunity to say yes to what you said no to. Your no is someone else’s yes, and if you stop trying to be everything, then someone else can be something.”

Today as I stood there making the food, I realized it made me cranky actually having to stand there, and spend all that time waiting for the food to be ready, and I understood why God kept telling me that. It’s something I can do as a hobby, or when I feel like it, but it’s not something I want to do as anything else. I enjoy food. I love to eat it, and I even enjoy the process of putting it together and perfecting a recipe, but cooking doesn’t make my soul sing.

In the middle of all this I looked out the window and discovered that the trees had begun to bring forth leaves. I got so excited forming a caption/post in my head as I ran out to take a picture, that I didn’t care how I looked standing in the middle of the road trying to get the perfect angle, I didn’t care that I could get hit, (lol I mean I cared enough to try to be careful, but you get my point) or that people were looking at me weird. All I cared about was getting the perfect picture to share with everyone what the tree made me think about to encourage them.

Sometimes we go through seasons of barrenness and dryness, but as long as our roots go deep, a new season will come and just like trees in spring, we’ll start to sprout leaves again.

So sometimes in life, we have things that we love and are attached to, things that have been with us for as long as we can remember, that we maybe even do really well, and they’re good things, but God is calling us to something else that’s strange and uncertain, and we have to trust that He knows us better than us, and so knows what we need to be doing, even when we want to be doing something else.

Who knows you’ll find that it’s what He wants that’ll make your soul sing happy songs, as well as bless other people.

Love, Yoma.