What's your gift?

And how will you give it?

Caspar, Melchior, and Belthazar make their annual appearance

I’ve mentioned a number of times how we enjoy having students over for dinner—that’s been particularly true this fall as we’ve had a regular influx each Sunday. With food comes conversation, and these range all over the place. That said, since Kraig teaches civil engineering, and since LeTourneau is a polytechnic university, the majority of the students are in engineering fields, and conversation leans heavily into technical concepts. This is not my field, so there are plenty of times I phase out of the conversation and my presence is more of a smile, a nod, and a plate full of food.

A few weeks ago when I was prepping for our Sunday class I noticed that the word Paul uses that is translated “art” in Acts 17:29 is “techne” in Greek. Apparently the word can be translated as “art,” “occupation,” or “craft,” so it has a broad use, but it struck me that we don’t often think of technology or tech as artistic. Yet the skills Kraig and his students learn and employ have a beauty of their own when they’re done well. There is a beauty in their usefulness—a loveliness in things that work well. When I drive on a road, cross a bridge, or enter a building, I like to know that the ones who built it made the correct calculations and followed through on them.

I’m also very thankful I don’t need to understand the math myself and can focus on the skills I do have. My own gifts are different, and that’s a good thing. I can also delight in the gifts that others have without feeling jealous or less important. After all, if all of us were creating buildings, who would make the meals, or write the stories, or tell others about Christ? The important thing is that we lean into the gifts we have and use them well.

This year I’ve been working my way through a book of letters of novelist and playwright, Dorothy L. Sayers. I also read a series of essays by author Flannery O’Connor. Both women, writing in the middle of the 20^th Century on opposite sides of the Atlantic, emphasized a similar theme regarding how we do our work.

In one letter Sayers takes on “flabby and sentimental theology which necessarily produces flabby and sentimental art.” She says, “…for any work of art to be acceptable to God is must first be right with itself. That is to say, the artist must serve God in the technique of his craft; for example, a good religious play must first and foremost be a good play before it can begin to be good religion.”^⁠1

This theme comes up again and again in Sayers’ work. Even her heroine Harriet Vane from her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries reflects it in Gaudy Night when someone asks her how she can justify writing about murders in her detective novels.

“I know what your thinking” [Harriet says] “—that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well.”

The other author, Flannery O’Connor, wrote short stories that often come across as grim and shocking, yet gleam with a strong shot of grace if you read them correctly. When you’re writing to people who don’t hold the same beliefs as yourself, she states, then “you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.^⁠2” She was certainly skilled in this. I don’t feel any need to write the same way, but I agree with her point. This thought as well: “…what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist—for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”^⁠3

I hope all this is resonating with you! I’ve had these various thoughts running around in my head for a while, and I’m trying to pull them together in a cohesive piece. This morning I mentioned to some friends that I needed to see if I could get my thoughts onto the page today, and my friend Karen sent the December 15 entry from Oswald Chambers classic devotional, My Utmost for His Highest. It echoed what I’m trying to get across:

“Strive to re-express a truth of God to yourself clearly and understandably, and God will use the same explanation when you share it with someone else. But you must be willing to go through God’s winepress where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle, experiment, and rehearse your words to express God’s truth clearly.”

In this entry Chambers starts with 2 Timothy 2:15, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

Every action I take, every word I write, is a reflection of what’s going on inside me, and a pouring out, in some way, of the gifts God has given me. When those actions and words don’t ring true, or they fail, it often means I haven’t worked through them enough to present them rightly. However, sometimes it might mean I’m trying to use gifts God didn’t give me.

When it comes down to it, I want civil engineers to be planning infrastructure, mechanical engineers to design machines I use, visual and tactile artists to make things that I can see and touch, poets and musicians to pull together words and music in ways that make my heart sing, pastors and teachers to bring light into dark places. I cannot do all of these things (you really wouldn’t want me to design a bridge, and I can’t design and sew clothes at all), but I can do the things I’m gifted in. Living within my own limitations is the way I can best glorify God, and it gives me ample room to freely rejoice in the gifts of others. I can let the engineers have their technical conversations, and I will feed them a tasty dinner…and write about all of it.

These are gifts I have to give, this Christmas and beyond. What’s your gift?

¹ “Letter to Brother George Every, 12 May 1941.” The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, Volume II, 1937-1942, From Novelist to Playwright. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998, p. 261.

² “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Mystery and Manners—Occasional Prose. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969.

³ “Catholic Novelists,” Mystery and Manners—Occasional Prose. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969.

---

Art for the week

Even a polytechnic university has a dramatic flair, and last Saturday LeTourneau’s drama club put on “The Troy Saga,” from the musical, Epic. The blocking and acting was great—so much fun. Our nephew was “young Odysseus,” and Evie helped bring a few of the costumes to life, including our nephew’s. They even had a platform…that Kraig and the other civil engineers in the audience tried very hard not to look at closely!

---

The Daughter of Arden Trilogy

Check out Daughter of Arden at Bandersnatchbooks.com, along with other great titles.

You can find links to more of my writing at A Shaft of Sun Through the Rain and my old blog, Willing, Wanting, Waiting.

Facebook - Author Page

Instagram - Author Account

Don’t forget to check out Bandersnatch Books’ podcast, including my interview in Season 1, episode 2!