Stay Amazed: Unearthing the Gifts of Others: Don Everts

So I was thinking about something the other day. When we were dating and got engaged, then we got married. I remember you just celebrating my gifts and my abilities and just loving them when we were dating.

Oh no, where is this going? And then we get married and it wasn't very long. You're like, somebody asks you, what are Dave's gifts?

And you're like, eh. And like six months ago, you had a list and now you're like, I don't know if he has any. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most.

My name is Toby Abbott and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. You think that's difficult in marriage? It was difficult in our marriage. That's embarrassing. Totally, yes.

I mean, what happened? Did I lose my gifts? No, I think this can happen in marriage where you still had all those gifts, but shame on me for now noticing your weaknesses. Oh, I did the same thing. We all do it. Yeah, we're laughing because every couple. We all do it because we start to think, oh, I didn't see that before. But it's interesting, though, how we do that in marriage with our kids, in friendship, because everyone has a honeymoon phase. Even at work, there's a honeymoon phase. Like, these people are amazing.

This is unbelievable. And then. We all have weaknesses and we all have shortcomings. But we all have gifts.

We do. And we've got Don Everts back in the studio to talk about gifts. Don, is this something that you've done in your own marriage? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was thinking, yeah, familiarity breeds contempt is a phrase, but it's not that exactly. It's something like familiarity breeds like maybe taking things for granted. Maybe that's what we do is because we're around it a lot. And, you know, like my wife, Wendy, it's like, well, of course, she's hospitable. I mean, she's the queen of hospitality. And then you get used to that and it used to just startle me. And now it's like, well, of course, she's incredible at that. And yeah, I think how do we.

You never got to the point of saying, like, why do we have to have these people in our house all the time? Oh, totally. No, absolutely. Totally. I married an extrovert.

I'm an introvert. So, yeah, I mean, that's that's a landscape we walk all the time. But yeah, I think there are ways that when you first meet someone or when you're enthralled with someone, how you're just captivated by certain features. So I think some of it, as we as we look at the research about giftings and look at what the Bible says about it, I think part of it is like, how do I remain amazed by people? Captivated.

How do I remain captivated? You know, in the airport on the way down here, you know, I was reading my book again to remember all the details. By the way, your book is called Discover Your Gifts Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know. So that's what we're sort of getting into. And you've done all the study on it.

So you're like the gift expert. But at the airport. I'm sitting in the airport and looking at this again. And, you know, people watching. And people are going by and I'm just watching the people and thinking, how do I get so bored by people, you know, or take them for granted?

Or I'm just disappear into my cell phone when I'm surrounded by these. Masterpieces. These masterpieces that God, like the language in Genesis one, all the verbs are craftsman verbs. You know, it's he created, you know, Psalm 139. It's knit.

He knitted and crafted them together. And we're surrounded by masterpieces. So, yeah. How do we allow the Bible to give us better lenses through which to see the people around us, including our spouses? Which would be interesting, too, because if we in the church would see one another and call out the greatness and see the masterpiece.

That's so attractive. Wouldn't people want to be in those doors when people. It's a magnet. Exactly.

It would absolutely draw people in. I can remember decades ago watching a marriage talk by a guy named Gary Smalley. Oh, yeah. You know that name?

Oh, yeah. He's no longer with us. He's with the Lord.

His son Greg now does ministry of focus on the family. And Gary talked about the Hebrew root of the word honor. Have you ever heard this? No.

Fascinating. I've forgotten it. And he was just like, you know, we're called to honor our mother and father, but we're called to honor one another. We are honor people. We should be known for honor.

And he goes, the root is a Hebrew word that means to bow or to bend the knee. And he said, his point was, you know, when you're in the presence of somebody really valuable, it's something you do. Some countries, they will literally bow. But, you know, we honor people not often based on whether we like them or not.

But based on their value. Or their position. Like when a judge walks in the courtroom, you say the honorable judge is like, I may not even like the guy or gal, but he's got a position of honor. And he goes, what would it look like if every time you're around a person, oh, I don't remember if he said this. He goes, when you honor people, you're sort of an ah. He goes, your jaw drops, ah. He goes, that's how we should approach our spouse, our kids, and your neighbor. Your neighbor. So my mom marries this guy named Buzz, okay?

Yeah, you talk about Buzz. He's the hardest human being for me ever to love. And he was tatted up motorcycle guy. Half his body was paralyzed. He had all of these brain surgeries because of a car accident in his 20s.

So he was like maturity and kind of maybe middle schooler, you know, that kind of thing. So hard for me to be around. And because of God and only because of God and through the Holy Spirit, my wife and I invited him to move in with us or invited them to move in with us. And this is not your biological dad?

No. So, I mean, that's a story unto itself. How God can call us like have the person who's hardest for you to love. Like I'm a nice guy around everyone except Buzz. Like I'm mean, right?

I just feel mean when I run. And so he lived with us. He's in your house every day. Well, he was. He's passed away now. But for what was it?

Six years, whatever it was. And the amazing thing that happened was in spite of my own bad attitude, in spite of my cynicism and being triggered by him, there'd be these little windows. You know, I remember my youngest in diapers on Buzz's lap and Buzz is reading this book to him that my son had brought him.

And I'm like, that's not that's not the book. And I watch and Buzz was just making up a story just based on the pictures of my son was laughing and laughing. And it was like, in spite of myself, I had to honor him. And like, I see the beauty of Buzz.

Like God has made him hilarious, humorous. And so there were these windows that I got where I got to see, have that moment, not literally bowing, but the moment of like, God, that's a masterpiece. Look at what you created.

Yeah. And that, you guys, that messed me up. Because if Buzz is a masterpiece, everyone's a masterpiece.

And like what and what does it do to look for that? Rather than like grudgingly seeing it, like to actually, everyone you meet and everyone you're with, friend or foe, to look for the masterpiece, to look for the beauty. I mean, that's such a, that's such a beautiful story. That's what Jesus did. Yeah. Right? I mean, everyone's like, get this leper out of here.

Oh, get this old widow out of here. And Jesus saw them. And he saw the, the, the dignity that they were imbued with by their creation. One of our sons has a preaching gift and he calls them God goggles.

He did a message once. Good, yeah. And he goes, you put on eyes of Jesus to see people the way Jesus saw them. And if you see people the way Jesus saw them, you will treat them the way Jesus did. And that's how we have to see the Mago Dei. We got to see the image of God in everyone. And I think, and let's just be super practical, even in parenting, our kids can hit phases that it's difficult. It is difficult to like them at times.

The image of God has left the building. But I remember saying to our boys at certain times, like, I just need some time with you. And you know what it was? Because we're all giving off sparks. We're all pushing each other's buttons. But there was something about just sitting down at a meal and I could see them like, ah, there you are. I see that because I get so messed up in my own head. And then I would say those things that I saw that God put in them. I'm like, look at you, look at you.

And how powerful is that for them being formed, you know, and to be, because you're right. I mean, we're managing households. I mean, families are busy. You have multiple kids.

You're just managing the household, let alone, you know, to like have time where you see one child and be able to reflect those things to them and build that into them. And, you know, God loves you. Not from just a like bumper sticker perspective. And not for what you do. Yeah. Yeah.

He loves you because he made you and he, you know, and you're amazing. And so it's been sobering for me to think about, as I've been in the research and the scripture and working on this book, how powerful it is to see people with God goggles. I haven't thought of it in that phrase, but that's perfect.

I need to revise a book now. I always hated how I preach all this stuff and nobody remembers it. My son gives a sermon, hey, God goggles. I'm like, I said that 20 times. Yeah, exactly. No, what is interesting is one of your themes of the book is everyone has a gift and with gifts to share. Yes. And I don't know if, you know, one of the things that we've done with Family Life for 30 plus years is we speak at their Weekend to Remember marriage getaway.

Yes. And one of the big ideas of that manual that I had never heard before going to this conference, we went to it as an engaged couple, two weeks before our wedding. And honestly, we've said this many times, we didn't listen because we thought we don't need this. You know, we love each other. We love Jesus. We're going to the ministry.

That's right. And now we teach it. But one of the big ideas is a critical point in marriage that I'd love to hear your thoughts on. And it's really going back to the garden store in Garden of Eden where, you know, Adam's asleep and God fashions Eve. And then God brings Eve to Adam.

And one of the questions we ask in the weekend is nobody thinks about this, but at that moment in the garden, there's a question. The question is, will you receive Eve as my gift to you? Because God the Father is walking her, in a sense, down the aisle to Adam. And so one of the points we try to make is, you know, Adam receives her very excitedly, you know, bone in my bone, flesh in my flesh.

In the Hebrew, it's exclamation. But I think what we miss, and this is one of the things we try to teach, is it wasn't because she was gorgeous. It wasn't because her mom is really good in the kitchen. He knew none of that.

Here's what he knew. God is bringing her to me. And God says she's a gift. He responded with such joy, not because he knew Eve, but because he really knew God.

So the question is this. We lose that in our marriage. You know, it's almost like, God, could you take her back? Hey, could you take him back?

I thought he was going to be this. We lose that sense of she's a gift, he's a gift, and they have gifts. How do we, you know, as you went through this research, is there something you found that people do that gets them excited to understand they are a gift and gifted and others are as well? Anything jump out that way?

It's interesting. So a couple of things come to mind. One of those is what we found out about discovering gifts and discovering giftedness. And people need help doing that.

So we need help. We need other people to help us see gifts that we have. And so there's something about relationship that giftedness thrives in relationship and in community. So one of the questions we asked people, and this is nationwide, you know, research, one of the questions we asked at the beginning was to rate yourself on a giftedness scale from zero to 10.

And so kind of how gifted would you say that you are? Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, really fascinating. And there's some like gender differences that came up. There's some fascinating things. But one of the interesting findings was, and it was a small but fascinating group, 3.5% of all people in the U.S., and they do their nerdy stuff.

So we know this is kind of normed across region, across all the stuff. 3.5% of all people in the U.S. gave themselves a zero. Wow. Wow.

Zero gifts. There were some things like if you are in a lower socioeconomic status, if you are unemployed, there are some certain things that tended to correlate with that group. But here was the big finding.

The big finding was how disconnected that group of people was when compared with the other 96.5%. To other people. To other people.

So I got this here. So a larger portion of the no-gift people, and for the people at home, I'm putting that in air quotes because everyone's gifted. But they just perceive they have no gifts. A large portion of them had not been to church in the last six months. Almost half of the group said that they didn't know any of their neighbors. They're less likely to have ever worked on a community project. And they don't feel that they have a sense of community in their life.

So those are other questions we ask people. So you can kind of cut the research and say, do these 3.5% quote-unquote no-gift people have anything else in common with each other? And what they have in common is that they're disconnected from other humans.

And you know what happens when we're disconnected as I'm wiping the tears off? Because that makes me so sad that people have zero. They feel like they have zero. Is when you're alone and you're isolating, what happens is you hear the lies of the enemy.

Totally. The lies of our culture. You're worthless. And the enemy is speaking death all the time.

He came to kill, steal, and destroy in our lives and our very well-being. And so when I hear that, it makes me so sad. Because for those of us who maybe didn't put a zero, we have the ability to see someone else and tell them, oh, I see your gifts.

And so you need other people in your life to see other people and call it out. I think of my mom. Anywhere I go with my mom, waiter, waitress, doesn't matter where we are, she stops and she says, you're really good at what you do. That's my wife.

Thank you for doing it. Anne's like that too, right? Yeah. And when I was a kid, that embarrassed me. Because I'm like, mom, we're at the store. Don't get into those conversations. And I look at it differently now.

And you know what? I'm trying to do it more myself. Like I'm having my mom rub off on me and to say to people, you're really good at what you do.

Thank you for doing that. Because we need other people partially because of the enemy and what he's saying. And then partially because our gifts get noticed by others. A lot of people don't understand their gifts because the things they're gifted at come easily to them. Oh, that's a good point.

And in the same way that we all assume everyone thinks the way we do, which leads to a lot of communication problems, we all assume people feel like we do. So it must be easy for everyone to do this. That's not a gift.

That's easy. And it's when we interact with other people and they go, man, you like the way you encourage people when you're, you know, you hear that enough times, you're like, maybe not everyone comes that easily to be encouraging. Maybe that's a gift of mine. Maybe I need to take that more seriously.

Am I being a full steward of that? But that comes from having people point things out. Should we log in our minds of these are the things that people have complimented me on, you know, like these are the things I've heard over and over? That's part of, so that every gift inventory that we've developed, part of the questioning comes to what do other people say to you?

Do people look to you for these sorts of things? That doesn't tell you everything, but that is a really important data point. And so is a significant part of what we do. We created a little workbook that goes with the book. And it's interesting because it's not just a workbook for like how to discover my gifts, although we do that. But in all of the 12 gifts that we look at, for each of them, it's like, let's learn about the gift. Do you have this gift? But then we spend a lot of time on who in your life would you say has this gift?

Write their name down. And we have exercises. What can you do to encourage that gift, to celebrate that gift? So, yes, commenting things on other people, paying attention to what people say to us, just giftedness thrives more in a place of community. Should we talk about those 12 gifts? Sure. Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah, hit them. You've got the wheel right there in front of you. I got the wheel right here. So again, these are based on kind of reverse engineering, some of this nationwide research, and these are all common gifts. So these are all gifts that are common to every human being.

We talked about that in our first time. It's not necessarily a spiritual gift. They're not spiritual gifts.

Yeah, these are believers, non-believers, all have these. So some of them are like entrepreneurial gifts, starting things. Some people just naturally think about starting stuff.

It's just, it's intuitive to them. Management gifts, right? So the ability to like organize resources and people to reach an end. Some people have gifts in that. Some of us just have to learn it, you know, but some people are actually gifted at it. Financial gifts, critical thinking gifts, artistic gifts. You know, don't just think of like painting, but like some people have a way with words.

Some people have a way with music. Some people, you know, so there's all these artistic gifts. You have a daughter in art school. What kind of art?

She does both painting and graphic design. Did you see that since she's been little? Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. As a toddler, she was drawing all over her body. We were on a car. We were on a long road trip. And Wendy and I, we were just talking in the front, like, I don't know why the kids are quiet.

We didn't, we didn't even, we just like were enjoying having adult conversation for like three hours. And then, you know, the kids were in the back just in diapers cause it was hot, you know. And we pull over, my daughter's entire body, except for her left arm. She's left handed. Was covered, not in scribbles, and she was a little toddler, in these intricate, like leafy, evenly spaced designs over her whole body with this ballpoint pen that she had found. And you said one day, honey, she'll be in art school.

That's it. And now she is. I remember I was with my mom, who's amazing at calling out gifts, sort of like your mom sounds like. Yeah. And we were at an aunt's or something. I don't, I have no idea.

I can see it right now. There was a piano, upright piano. I must've been four or five. I go over and I'm plucking away at something. And the woman was a piano teacher and she turns to my mom. I remember hearing her say this, your son has a gift.

Do you know that? She goes, what? He's playing a melody. He'd say, have you ever been taught anything?

I'd go, no, I just sat down and my mom got me music lessons the next day. Wow. It was like somebody saw and identified, and I can hear a song on the radio now and tell you every chord is going on just by hearing it. I didn't have any idea.

I don't think my mom did either. That's that person seeing it. And sometimes it takes someone who's not with you all the time. Don't you notice that as a parent? Yeah. That sometimes it takes someone else.

Cause you're like having to discipline the kid and you're having to teach them not to rock into the road and you have to get them to get up to go to high school or whatever. Yeah. And sometimes it's someone else with fresh eyes who's not having to like manage their life and teach them how to adult. Yeah.

Who's able to look with just fresh recreational eyes and go, man, they are blank. Do you also need the person that goes, no, that isn't your gift? Like Simon Cowell? Like you think you can sing. I know your parents told you you can.

You actually can. I mean, there's a little balance to that as well. Totally. Totally. Yeah.

I'm not necessarily a fan of giving everyone a trophy no matter what. Right. Yeah. There's something.

I've had people who wanted to be hired as campus ministers. I'd be like, yeah, you're not good at it. You don't want to.

And you want to know that. You gotta know what I'm not good at too. And here's part of what's relevant about that. We tend to, in the church, lift up certain vocations over others. And we bias things towards certain vocations.

Oh yeah. And I know we're supposed to be listening to 12 gifts, but I want to say this now. And we do that. And we pastors, we are the most guilty of this. We lift up vocations in the church.

Those are the only ones that matter. What does faithfulness look like? It looks like using your gifts in the church. Generosity. Generosity especially. That's an important gift.

That's right. And there was this guy who kept coming to me. He was in my university group, right?

And I had disabled him, raised him up. And I want to come on staff. And I was like, oh, now that like you're... And he was this like gifted engineering student.

Like critical thinking skills, all those sort of things. And no, he comes back a second time. I really think you should hire me. I really be... Like three or four times I had to say, I'm not going to hire you. Like, you're not good at this. You are a good engineer.

You're gifted at that. But what we were working against was this kind of weird Christian bias we have towards certain vocations. And he needed me to lift up and celebrate more. And so some of it was on me, you know, that I needed to lift up and say, God has given you critical thinking skills and engineering technical skills to pursue the common good of your society, of your neighborhood, of the people around you.

So that's the thing that comes up is like, how do we... sometimes we need to be told no, because I just want to do what my hero does. Or we feel like it's more spiritual to go into ministry. If I love Jesus, surely I'll go into ministry, but your ministry can be in your workplace. That's right. That's a huge thing that Luther did during the Reformation, because in the mid ages, the faithful vocation, if you had a calling, it was a priest, a monk, or a nun.

That's it. And they recognized, well, we need milkmaids and we need carpenters. But it's kind of second class Christians. And what Luther did is he like rediscovered a lot of what we're looking at in this book. Like, what does the Bible say about gifts and about calling? And Luther wrote at one point, when a father changes a diaper, the angels sell it. Like there's something about like doing all the gifts that pursue the common good and bless the neighbor and bless industry and society that we need to lift up.

God is just as responsible for those gifts and honored by our using them in those other vocations as well. Well, somebody has the gift of, I can't leave something unsettled, and you've only hit like five of the 12. So they're literally like, give me the other five or six and we only have a couple minutes. Can you do them in a minute or two? Let's do it. Just give a fly by. Speed round.

We're going to do a speed round. So there are also civic gifts, like the ability to work governmental systems, intercultural gifts, communication gifts, which I think are really obvious. Leadership gifts, teamwork gifts, which is the ability to make a team work. Technical gifts.

Now those are everything from playing the piano. That's a technical gift because you're developing a technical and that's both artistic and technical. Like someone who's good at coding, the people who are recording and who are going to cut and work on this piece that we're doing. We're using communication gifts. They're using technical gifts to produce the same thing all in teamwork together. Interpersonal gifts. So those are the 12 and you can see how each of them also is kind of a bucket in which really there's a big variety of gifts. Stick around because Ann is going to talk about a practical idea to help us see and discover some of what we're actually gifted at and be able to encourage one another in our homes at the same time.

I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to David and Wilson with Don Everts on family life today. You know, I love that Don went through all the different kinds of gifts there just a second ago, because the tendency is to look at someone else's gift and go, I can't do that and feel inferior in that process. Or maybe to examine your own gifts and begin to feel superior to others. The point is, is that there's tremendous variety in what God dishes out to all of us. We are just to be thankful for the gifts God has given us and applaud the gifts he has given to other people, because it's not about us. It's about God. It's about him and his glory.

And he's going to glorify himself through us in different ways. You know, Don has written a book called Discover Your Gifts, celebrating how God made you and everyone you know. In this book, you'll discover how our gifts are a blessing to others and pave the way for reconnecting with our surrounding communities. Discover Your Gifts is our gift to you when you partner with us financially. So you can go online to familylifetoday.com or give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800, F is in family, L is in life, and then the word today.

All right, here's Anne. She's going to talk about a practical idea you can use to help others in your family see what their giftings are. I think this is just a great reminder. We so often in the church and even in our homes in the body of Christ, we're focusing in on spiritual gifts, which are really important.

Absolutely. There's so many tests on spiritual gifts, but to look at common gifts, to think, what am I passionate about? What am I good at? To start telling our neighbors, our friends, but especially even tonight at the dinner table, to ask each other, to ask your kids, Hey, you guys, let's talk about Mark tonight.

What do you think his gifts are? I think that's just a fun thing to do. We just celebrated our granddaughter's eighth birthday. And we started this as a tradition and now our kids are doing it too, where on that birthday, everyone in the family kind of acknowledges the gifts of their sibling.

And it's one of the sweetest things. Back when our kids were the kids, you know, they're like, what are we doing again? We're doing this. But now as a grandparent, I'm weeping because it's such a gift to give, especially we take one another for granted in our households.

And I'll just add this. I remember the first time Ann said, Hey, it's dad's birthday. Let's go around. I remember sitting there going, no, let's not.

Seriously, are we going to? And then by the end of the, you know, it didn't take long, but by the end of every son saying it, Ann, you're sitting there going, thank you. That really was a gift to me. Just to hear that. And why do we stop it? Don't stop it.

Invite it. It's honoring. Yeah. Yeah, it's honoring.

It's where we started. I'm in the presence of someone extremely valuable. Now, coming up tomorrow, Don Everts is back with David Ann Wilson to talk about how God calls us to use our gift, even outside our quote unquote calling. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us on behalf of David Ann Wilson. I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.