The curse of the gifted

LET’S be warned about this common and abidingly proximate

danger. God has given us tremendous gifts. He has made us image and

likeness of his. And so, he has given us intelligence and will,

talents and skills, and so many other endowments that we even fail to

realize.

            We always have to remember that with these gifts we are

meant to live our life with God, knowing, loving and giving him glory.

Also with these gifts, we are meant to love everybody else,

irrespective of how they are.

            We have to be most wary of our tendency to use these gifts

solely for our own purposes and interests. In other words, there’s

always the danger of using them for self-indulgence alone, instead of

giving glory to God and loving and serving others.

            This sad reality is quite rampant today as it was since

time immemorial. We cannot deny that we see many men and women who are

highly gifted with intelligence, talents, beauty, good health,

resources, power, fame, but who are simply indulging themselves with

these gifts.

            Instead of glorifying and thanking God for these gifts,

and using them to serve the others, they just enjoy themselves with

what they have. It is like they are stealing and making as their own

what actually belong to God and to the others.

            And this reality can be so self-deceiving that we hardly

would notice that we are already falling into the trap of pride,

vanity, arrogance, vainglory and the like. The charm of these gifts

can be so intoxicating that we hardly realize that we are already

splurging into some kind of sweet poison.

            This is when we can have what we may call as the curse of

the gifted, a condition of life where this anomaly becomes invincibly

embedded. What makes things worse is that precisely because of these

gifts and endowments, we can be so very clever and smart that we can

easily hide the anomalies and even mask them as something good.

            We should be constantly aware of from whom our gifts and

other endowments come, and for whom they are. For this to happen, we

have to remind ourselves of who we really are. We are not our own

creator and therefore we neither are our own creature. God is our

Creator and we are his creatures.

            Everything we have comes from him and rightly belongs to

him. We have to live our life always with God at the start, middle and

end of everything. And as a corollary, we have to live our life with

our duty to love and serve the others always in mind. We have to live

by this basic truth always.

            It would certainly require us to be humble to acknowledge

this basic truth and to start living in accordance to it. We have to

vigorously fight against our tendency to be proud and conceited that

would effectively blind us from this truth.

            In this regard, we really would need God’s grace and our

all-effort since we have to contend with tremendous enemies. The world

culture, for one, is now dominated by the evil spirit of pride and all

forms of self-glorification.

            And so, whenever we are aware of the gifts and endowments

given to us by God, especially the very special and uncommon ones, we

should not be too happy and too eager to use them unless we refer them

first to God, thanking him and asking him as to how we ought to use

them.

            We have to consider first the intention we have with

respect to these gifts. We just cannot embark on some projects and

adventure motivated only by our own purposes and interests. Such

attitude can only bring us to disaster, even if we manage, at least

for a time, to show some signs of success.