I Am Good At The Thing Nobody Praises

Here is the shape of your particular problem.

There are two kinds of competence in the world. The first kind fixes things that have gone wrong. That kind is visible, it is dramatic, and it gets thanked, because everybody saw the problem and then everybody saw it solved.

The second kind stops things going wrong in the first place. Nobody sees that, including the person doing it, because what it produces is an absence, and nobody has ever walked into a room and said, look at all this that did not happen.

You are the second kind.

You are the reason a great many things have not happened, and work that prevents a disaster has never once been smaller than work that repairs one.

And I want to be honest about the cost of it, because there is one and it is not just the lack of thanks.

The cost is that you have no evidence. A person who fixes things accumulates stories. A person who prevents things accumulates nothing, and then somebody asks what they are good at and there is a blank where the examples should be.

So you say something vague, and you hear how vague it sounds, and you conclude that the vagueness is about you rather than about the nature of the work.

As every one hath received the gift

There is an instruction in Peter that is unusually flat about how gifts are distributed.

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. (1 Peter 4:10, King James Version)

As every one. Even so minister the same.

There is no ranking in that sentence. There is no list of the impressive ones followed by the quiet ones. Every person has received something, and the instruction to each of them is identical.

You are inside an instruction that was given to everybody without a hierarchy attached, and a quiet gift has never once been given a smaller instruction than a loud one. 1 Peter 4:10 says as every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same, and the Holy Spirit is the one who left the ranking out of it.

And the word manifold is doing real work in that verse. Manifold means many folded, many kinds, coming in shapes that do not resemble each other.

Which means the grace given to you was never meant to look like the grace given to the person beside you, and the fact that yours does not look like anything obvious is exactly what that word covers.

You have a gift shaped differently from the visible ones and it was always going to be, and a thing that does not look like the others has never once been a thing that is missing. The Holy Spirit is the one who distributes that manifold grace, and it is written in 1 Peter 4:10 as many kinds rather than as one kind in different amounts.

Count the absences

So here is the practical work, and it is going to be strange, because it involves counting things that did not occur.

Think back over the last two years in whatever you do. A job, a church, a family, a street.

Now ask this. What has not gone wrong.

The event that ran without a single thing missing. The rota that never once left a gap. The order that has been right every time for two years. The old woman who has not had a day without somebody checking, because you set that up and nobody remembers you setting it up.

You are able to list absences once somebody tells you that absences count, and a smooth two years has never once happened by itself. The written word calls everyone a steward of what they were given, and the Spirit of God is the one who sees what did not happen as clearly as what did.

And there is a second and harder thing to look at.

Prevention work is usually done by somebody who can see a problem coming. That is the actual skill underneath it: not tidiness, not diligence, but foresight, applied early enough that the problem never arrives.

That is rare, and it is the thing people pay for once they understand what it is.

You have foresight and have been calling it fussiness, and seeing a thing coming has never once been the same as worrying about it. The Holy Spirit is the one who names a capability correctly, and 1 Peter 4:10 calls a person a steward rather than a helper.

Say what did not happen

So the assignment, and there is a specific instruction for how to word it.

Say out loud the one thing you are genuinely good at, and name one person who needs it. 1 Peter 4:10 gives every person the same instruction about what they received, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman permission to say hers out loud.

And here is the wording. Use an absence as your example.

Not I am organized. Say: I can take a thing that goes wrong every month and make it stop going wrong, and after about six weeks nobody will remember it ever did.

That sentence lands. The other one does not.

You are able to describe your own work by what it prevents, and an absence named out loud has never once been a weaker example than a rescue. The Spirit of God is the one who makes the invisible sayable, and the written word calls this stewardship of grace rather than a knack for detail.

And one name. Somebody within reach who has a thing that goes wrong every month.

You have a person in mind already, and the first one to arrive has never once been the wrong place to begin. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a name forward, and it is written that every person has received something to minister to another.