This is the question I am asking myself. I know it will mean something different to you.
I remember the year of traveling around the state meeting with bank heads. In a position loftier than my talent and probably not where my heart or ambitions lay. Traveling with older, more sophisticated and experienced colleagues.
Over lunch on the road one day, the boldest of us looked around at everyone and asked, if you could be or do anything …? My answer came so easily. I would take the stage and sing.
They laughed. I blushed. If you only knew how laughable that really was. While I do love what a stage means to a heart of service and conviction that desires to move people, it turns out I am a person with little courage. I shrink from a spotlight. Social media terrifies me.
I finished reading a book for the second time. She stands, elegantly, but soiled, before a crowd of leering faces. She hears the whisper to look, really look, at all the faces before her. They look like her. Tired. Disillusioned. Defiant. Lonely. Despairing. She sings into them. When she falters, someone stronger sings for her.
I think, isn’t this life? One of the tools of our trade for donor onboarding is a message matrix. We examine all the faces in the prospect audience and message to them. There are so many. There is always the skeptic … the one who isn’t buying what you’re singing.
Doesn’t the courage to be who you are and what you are gifted to do—to sing into the difficult crowd that is our culture today—come from seeing into the faces to realize we are all afraid. No one of us is really taller or stronger.
It’s Valentine’s Day. Lying in bed early this morning, thinking about gifts of the heart, I remembered these words … If you, then … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
He is the giver of the gifts inside us. When the song vanishes and courage fails, his voice will carry.
