I’d like to speak about giving your gift. I would define giving your gift as Letting the love you are move through the capacities you’ve got. In other words, Being yourself. And the definition of service is “giving your gift.” If you give your gift, you’re in service and you’re letting love be in the world because you are present. Often people think to serve means to bow down to someone or give away your money. Not true. The highest level of service is the consistent deliverance of yourself into the world, being the revelation of the reality of your Being. Therefore, you can serve, no matter what you’re doing. Let love move through you while you’re weeding. Let love move through you while you’re cooking a meal. Let love move through you while you’re clearing up an uncomfortable situation with someone.

I read a book years ago, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High. The authors suggested we change the word confrontation to carefrontation. When things are difficult to talk about and there is a decision to be made, you can decide to care enough about the person and the circumstance that you’re willing to address the situation with care. There is a desire to honor the substance between you. People do avoid confronting difficult topics, thinking it will be a battle. This book suggests you acknowledge that the person matters, so this conversation matters. I want your gift and my gift to be present on earth, so we need to address why this isn’t working very well. Let’s care enough to find a way. Sometimes the issue is simple; sometimes it’s very complex.

When human relationships are complex it is often because judgment or fear have locked us up. This internal tension affects the way we show up in the world. We end up not giving our gift and not receiving the gift from another. Have you ever had people judge you for something, and then they found out later it wasn’t true? Or the other way around, where you misjudged another? Either way, caring enough to speak about it allows for healing.

If we’re going to give our gifts, we need to allow ourselves to be in our authority, to be in the stature of the reality of who we are. When that is true we’re not only filled with joy and peace, we’re owning our expression. There is ecstasy in delivering yourself into the world that you won’t experience any other way. No amount of pleasing people will let you feel the joy and ecstasy of just being yourself. No amount of money, for sure, no amount of things will bring you to the place of ecstasy, where you relax into being yourself.

The less you are yourself, the more you have the tendency to compromise all the dimensions of who you are. You compromise your joy, you compromise your beauty, and you compromise your engagement with people, perhaps because you believe that who you are isn’t good enough. You allow your light to be dimmed so that no one is offended. What is also true is that no one gets to know you or to receive your gift. I’m sure you’ve heard the instruction to “Let your light shine; don’t put it under a bushel.” Being yourself and letting love move through you into the world changes the world. Your gift comes with the reordering influence of love. Love has order and design in it. When you bring it, you bring order, you bring design.

Remember…

Your gift is going to be unique.

Don’t waste your time comparing it to other people, because it will be uniquely yours. We’re all part of one body of humanity and we’re all unique. So are our gifts.

Your gift will change over time.

How you deliver your gift and how you present yourself not only changes as you get older; it changes when you understand more, when you have more wisdom. When you are with people who are speaking the language of love, you start to learn a whole other way to be in the world, and the way in which you would have delivered yourself before you knew that language will be different once you do know. When you know the language of love, when you know what it’s like to speak words from your own sovereignty, your gift will change. For instance, your gift may have looked like the gift of patience. But there is a difference between being patient as a young person and being patient as a grandmother, a grandfather, or an elder. The measure and complexity grows into a mature beauty.

Your gift is complementary.

Your gift will complement anybody else’s gift because they’re all coming from the source of love. The source of love invites more life, more communion, more joy. Ecstasy is known in true communion, isn’t it? We are designed to know an ecstatic life and to share that with others.

Your gift is ever-refreshing.

I don’t mean refreshing like a cool drink of water. I mean refreshing like a computer. You hit the refresh button and make your computer current. Who you thought yourself to be needs to be refreshed right now, because you are different than you were yesterday. Also, your audience is different. Your audience is the people to whom you give your gift. The people in the room, at your office, in your own home. They are all changing. Who is present changes. And even if it is the same people, they have changed and you are in a different part of a creative process.

So you have to hit the refresh button and say, What’s needed now? What do I have that would be of greatest service to the people I’m here with? And again, the greatest service is to be yourself. Be the revelation of love. Invite others to know that experience because you are present. The refresh button on the computer allows it to get current. It gets you into the current reality, the reality of this moment. Are you current in your life? Is the gift you want to give relevant to the people you are with?

People are often waiting for the right moment or the right people to give their gift. They are afraid they will be rejected or judged. You know what’s going to change all that? Giving your gift. You can give your gift into a field of mixed people, mixed emotion, or confusion. Sure, it looks different from when you give it in more harmonious circumstances. But whenever you give your gift, you are changing the world. The gift of love, the gift of the truth of who you are, cannot be tainted by the moral compromise of others. That does not touch you. I’ve seen people sell their soul and the deepest parts of their heart to try and fit in. They compromise themselves because they don’t believe they will be accepted by others unless they do. It is never worth it.

The source of Being that infiltrates you, that allows you to be present and alive right now, is trustworthy. It is connected to the ordering power of love. Love has an ordering power. It has a design and dominion. And it is you. It is not coming from outside yourself, trying to make you a slave to it. You do not need to be a follower of someone else’s opinions about your life. You need to be a leader. You need to be a “bringer.” But the only way you can be a leader and be a bringer is to be a follower. Now, did I just contradict myself? No, I did not, because to follow the impulse of love makes you a leader. In fact, you can’t lead unless you are willing to follow the impulse of love. What percentage of you is available to do that? If you haven’t stopped judging yourself and the people in your world, part of you is not available to the current of love. Trying to get your love through a heart filled with judgment is hard work and unfulfilling. There is no ecstasy in it.

Yesterday I saw a Facebook post showing a tag in a grocery store. The label said “Orgasmic Blueberries” instead of “Organic.” “Orgasmic Blueberries—$2.98/pound.” And I thought, Everybody in the world should be eating those! A natural invitation to ecstasy!

You also have to start releasing what you think you’re not good at. That’s what stops people from giving their gift. They think, I’m not good at being with people. I’m not good at being a loving person. So they stop themselves from giving a gift that is only theirs to give, thinking they’re not going to be good at being themselves. That makes no sense. What kind of culture are we living in where that’s what people have been taught? Don’t be yourself, because you won’t be good at it. Really? Where does that come from?

We live in a world where, as a child, we learned how to behave in our home, our school, our community. Everyone wants to belong and feel loved, so we behaved in a way that made others happy. And we lost a knowing of ourselves. Let’s reclaim our primal nature and our awareness that we have a gift to give and the ability to give it. Underneath all the layers of personality is the core spiritual reality of who we are. The current of love that is ordering everything is in there. It is ordering everything in the natural world. The place where there’s a disconnect is in the human experience. As our spiritual centering strengthens and we are a fuller expression of who we are, we are great at being ourselves.

We are instruments of love, designed to give a very particular gift that is uniquely ours. Our gift is unique, it’s ever-changing, it’s complementary, and it’s always being refreshed.