May 2013
Pearl Cup, Dallas, Texas
April and I met at Signature Nails, my favorite local nail salon, where I was getting a manicure. April is twenty-two and in my college small group, but she is a working woman, our church’s pastoral coordinator. She’s keeping God’s people going to the right place at the right time with the right things in hand.
Let me tell you about my nails. They are tiny. I mean, like really tiny. And for a lot of my life, I bit my nails like crazy, but in the last couple of years, I’ve pretty much quit. I mean, I still bite them if I get supernervous. Or if I’m feeling superinsecure.
Or if I am editing a book.
But on your normal run-of-the-mill day, I’ve quit biting them.
(I’m taking a bow right now because I think you should be applauding me for mostly defeating a bad habit.)
And now I love getting my nails painted. They are still stubby and small, even on their best days, but I like to paint them. Ahem, get them painted. It’s a good use of ten dollars every few weeks, I say to my budget.
When April arrived at Signature, I was still picking out my color. A gray? A pink? Something soft. It was almost summertime, and with beach trips coming up, I knew I wanted a color that would work as an optical illusion to convince people that I was actually tan.
(I don’t tan. I burn. I’m a porcelain doll. I’d have been a hit with the fellas in the 1800s.)
I ended up with an Essie brand color called Baby’s Breath. It’s a creamy white that leans toward peach with a hint of shimmer. Pretty much, I wanted to purchase the entire bottle immediately because it is the perfect shade.
Alas, I didn’t. I let some guy named Luke trim and massage and clip and paint my stubby nails while April sat beside me as Betty painted her nails a racy hot pink.
Afterward, as our nails dried under that weird blue light, I asked April about being brave. I stepped into my small group leader role and asked, “What part of being brave do you want us to talk about? Like, right now?”
“I want you to talk about how you figure out what to do with your life.”
Oh sure, April. No biggie. And then I almost passed out because that seems HUGE and like the absolutely most necessary thing to be brave about and maybe I’m not sure how to do it. But I knew what I needed to tell her. The story came to my mind immediately.
A few months ago I was riding on a plane from here to there reading Freefall to Fly by Rebekah Lyons. (Will you please read it? You should. Please.) I was sitting in an aisle seat, which I never do. I’m a window girl. I feel like the difference between an aisle seat and a window seat is the difference between an airbus and an encounter with God. An aisle seat just guarantees you you’ll get to your destination. A window seat with a view of the ground from a cruising altitude of over ten thousand feet shows you parts of God’s creation that blow your mind.
As we flew, I devoured that book. Her writing is just beautiful. And then I came to the chapter where she writes about the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. A rich man is headed off on a journey, so he brings together his servants and passes out his money to them. (Interesting tactic. Let’s see how this plays out.) He gives one guy five bags of gold, another two, and another got one.
The guy with five bags? He gets to work, and when his boss gets back, he has five more to offer him — ten bags of gold total. The servant with two bags does the same — he gets to work and brings his owner twice what he had. But the guy with one bag of gold just buried it, dug it up when boss man got home, and handed back that same bag of money, probably stained by the dirt.
The rich man is thrilled with the first two dudes — obviously — and invites them to celebrate and share in the wealth. He’s less pleased with the third. Actually, he’s furious with that one-buried-talent guy.
I read Matthew 25:14 – 30 that day. I had read the story many times. Five to ten (that was good), two to four (that was good), one to one (and that was bad). The NIV calls them “bags of gold,” but many historical texts call them “talents.” A talent is a bag of gold.
But then as I read Rebekah’s book, she asked me to think about any talents in my life that I had buried. Like, real talents, the way we use the word now in our modern culture, meaning things I want to try to do with my life, based on my desires and skills and giftings. (The old bait and switch, Rebekah. Well played.) And then she said to make a list and write them down.
It took my breath away. I closed the book, looked to the right and to the left, and tried to breathe normally. I didn’t want to do this.
To be fair, I’ve made a few brave career choices — quitting teaching to pursue writing, quitting a great job at a nonprofit organization in Nashville called Mocha Club to step out into full-time writing and speaking.* But there was a talent I had buried in my heart that I didn’t want to bring up.
It’s that thing you want to do with your life that you quietly google sometimes or tell one friend once in college or ask your mom about in passing once, hoping she will actually think it’s a great idea.
I want to be on TV.
I feel dumb even typing it to you, just like I felt dumb when I told my mom and my friend in college and why I quietly google “how to be on the Disney Channel” and then clear my history because if anyone saw that I would be mortified and probably make up some excuse about doing research for a book.
I don’t want to be an actress. I want to host a television show that young adults love but isn’t cheesy or dirty. (No joke, my stomach is in my throat just writing this. But it’s what I want to do.)
At one time I genuinely thought everyone wanted to do this with their life. As an elementary school kid, I would practice my autograph in the steamed-up mirror in my bathroom after a shower. I would bike around our concrete carport and practice answering interview questions and interviewing others.
But as I grew up, I gently laid down that dream, slid some dirt over it, and stomped it down a bit, until it was good and buried.
And then, that day on the airplane, Rebekah kicked at the dirt and made me see it. And then she had the guts to ask me to pick it up and do something with it.
How dare she.
I went to a class once where the teacher was Seth Godin, business expert and bestselling author. It was a five-day intensive course called the NanoMBA. I learned a book’s worth of knowledge that week, but one of my greatest take-aways was the importance of failure.
When I pitched an idea to Seth Godin about how to get more people to share Mocha Club with their friends, he looked right in my eyes and said, “And what if that fails?” I was like, “Uh . . . my life will be over? I’ll be embarrassed? I don’t know what I’ll do?” And my armpits started to get sweaty.
He responded, “No, you’ll be fine. You’ll come up with another idea. This isn’t your last idea. It’s okay to fail.”
I believed him that day. I still do.
Seth is one of the most naturally brave people I’ve met. He tries things all the time — some go really well and some don’t. But he keeps trying because he is a creator and he is doing what makes him happy, and then he’s sitting back and letting the world decide if it makes them happy too.
That conversation with one of my business heroes was just the prep I needed before Rebekah challenged me to find my hidden talent. (This does not necessarily mean I’m actually talented as a TV person of sorts. She just shook up the desire I had tried to bury.)
The fear on that plane? The feeling like someone had just caught me picking my nose or reading something inappropriate? It meant that something was buried. I had been busted.
And I knew it.
In Eugene Peterson’s rendition of this parable in The Message, the master of the servants says to the first two, “From now on be my partner” (Matthew 25:21, 23). And that hit me right in the gut too.
What do I want most with my life? To be doing the things that partner me with God. I want to be his partner. When I look back on my life, the greatest joy will be to talk about the times I was partnered with God in what he was already doing. I can feel it now when I fall into those moments — the feeling that we are partners who are dancing together professionally and perfectly.
And whether the result is success or failure, I think the trying is what gets you a partnership. Neither of those two servants went gangbusters making money for their master. They just doubled their investment by the time he got back. I wonder if the first guy actually made seven talents but lost two in the process — so that when the master got home, he had ten to hand him, even if at one point he had twelve.
Maybe failure is in that story. We’ll never know. We just know that those first two dudes did the work so they could hand their master twice what he had handed them.
Chew on that, y’all.
I have a small group of people who advise me when it comes to work and life decisions. I call them my board of directors, though we never wear power suits or sit at a long, fancy boardroom table. We usually sit at my dining room table. They have unique jobs that make them experts in areas in which I wish to grow. One of the members of my board used to work for a television station and has all the contacts one might need to begin to pursue this dug-up talent. So as we gathered for our most recent meeting, I made a list of our agenda items and lightly scripted “TV show” in tiny print at the bottom, almost hoping we wouldn’t have time to get to it.
(Are you, like, beyond impressed with my natural courage? I know. Me too.)
(Sarcasm.)
We got through the meeting, and they could all see that last little line waiting to be checked off. So I spilled the beans. I lifted that talent out of the dirt and dusted it off and held it out to them with fear and trepidation. And for the next forty-five minutes, we talked about how to make that talent double.
And oh, am I scared. It sounds like work and it feels like vulnerability and it smells of getting in over my head.
But it also looks like being brave enough to honor the talents my Master has given me, whether I double it, triple it, or come back to him empty-handed.
“At least I tried?” I’ll say, with questioning in my voice.
And I think God will call me his partner.
So what are your talents? Will you let me kick up the dirt at your feet a little bit? Will you stop looking over your shoulder like I’ve busted you for reading about sex in Cosmopolitan and look me in the eye and tell me what talents you’ve buried?
I’m not saying you have to be brave enough to even do anything about it yet.
Just be brave enough to say it.
And then? You won’t have the heart to bury it again.
Here’s what, and I told you this when we first met some pages ago. You know the thing. You know what your call to courage is. As we grow in knowledge and understanding of how God made us, we also get to grow in our understanding of the talents he’s put in our hands.
My television confession is more than just a random example. It’s a challenge to you. I’m looking you in the eye and saying, “Hey, I dug up my talent. Will you?”
Will you?
Prove it.
*Mocha Club is a community of people (utilizing a community-based website) who give up the cost of a few mochas a month to fund development projects in Africa. We work in five main project areas: clean water, education, economic freedom, orphan care, and health care.