Wasting my gift

I am not a boastful person, so these couple paragraphs are going to be uncomfortable for me to write in a way. I usually underplay most of my accomplishments. Truth be told, I feel guilty about them most days. I am by no means anyone that people would consider "gifted" but I have been blessed enough to be successful at pretty much whatever I set my mind on.

Sports came easy to me. Softball, soccer, dance, karate, running....if I wanted to do it, I could. And pretty darn well. In school I basically got straight A's. It's not like I was one of those people who didn't have to study, because I did. But not too much. My friends would take hours and hours on their chemistry or calculus homework, I was done in an hour or so. At times, teachers played favorites to me because I did catch on so quick. I felt bad for the other students.

In my work life, I was blessed there, too. I started out as a hostess in a restaurant, but I was a good one. I could clear a lobby and fill an entire restaurant in a matter of minutes. Actually, I was so good at my job, other restaurants in our chain would call and ask me to come be lead on expected busy nights. I worked hard and worked my way up the ladder. Hostess, server, supervisor, manager, corporate trainer, general manager.... If I wanted it, I got it. By the time I was 27 I had everything I wanted from work. I was traveling, had the restaurant of my dreams, had received every award I wanted, had helped to develop and roll out nationwide training programs, I was training new managers, and I was even being sent to restaurants that were having trouble to help the management team "fix" things. And it had been easy. I didn't even go to school for it, and I knew more than the people with their nice little 4yr degrees. I was blessed.

A few years back , as we all know, I took on the job of stay-home mommy. Now, I am just going to leave that topic alone. LOL. I'll let ya know in about 18-20 more years if I was any good at that one. ;)

And it's not just school or work related. It all seems to come easy. My husband(boyfriend at the time) was running a painting business, and after a day on the job with him I was prepping houses to paint better and faster than he was. Working on our car and hubby can't get to the radiator or water pump, no problem. I'll just put them new ones in myself...can't be that hard.

I have been teaching myself some HTML and all my blog and web work is because I wanted to learn, so I Googled tutorials and don't stop until I learn what I want. And it's not all techinical/logic based stuff like I thought it was. I found out I have a creative side. Who knew?!?!? Not me! I spent 30 years of my life saying that God created me without a single creative bone in my body. I was wrong.

My point is that for the most part, I have been able to do or accomplish whatever I have wanted to. Whether the gift from God is the ability to do all these different things, or the gift is that I can do anything I set my mind to I am not sure. It doesn't matter. Either way it is from God. And what I am doing with it? More and more lately I feel like I am wasting it. I should be doing more to glorify HIM with them. How does fixing a radiator or being great at math or a fabulous career or my recent creative outlets bring glory to HIM? And if I still keep finding stuff after 35 years that I am good at, what more is there that I have yet to uncover? And what am I supposed to be doing?

What talents/treasures/gifts do you have that have yet to be discovered? And are you using the gifts you already know you have to bring glory to the Lord?