FamilyLife Today®

Don Everts: The temptation can be drink the coffee because I want to be amped up, I go into work, I give it my best, and then I come home and collapse. And I'm in that collapse mode while being a spouse and a parent. Am I giving it my best? Am I using my gifts in that place?

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com.

Dave Wilson: This is FamilyLife Today.

One of my favorite single verses in the Bible, New Testament. What do you think it is?

Ann Wilson: I don't know. Man, my wife doesn't know. Do you know what I would say?

Dave Wilson: For yours?

Ann Wilson: Yes.

Dave Wilson: I think you'd say Psalm 139: Fearfully and wonderfully made.

Ann Wilson: I like that one. What would it be?

Dave Wilson: Romans 12:1.

Ann Wilson: Of course. What's yours?

Dave Wilson: No, I love this because it's such a new, fresh, beautiful way to view people. Ephesians 2:10. Just listen to these words: "For we are His workmanship (the actual Greek word there is *poiema*, like He wrote us as a poem), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."

It's not only identity, but it's calling and it's gifting and it's what God wants us to do. It's such a beautiful view of who we are and everyone around us is. We've got Don Everts back in the studio to talk about the giftings of people in life. When I think of you, Don, and your book, *Everyone Has a Gift*, I think this verse has got to be central to your core theology.

Don Everts: It is. And what it says is these good works that He's prepared for us. So there's some forethought on God's part. When I was creating you, Dave, I didn't just create you because I wanted to look at you. I created you and shaped you because I want you to do damage in a certain way. I want you to be a blessing in a certain way. He's created works for us to do.

I love too that it is plural, that there's multiple works to do. There's more than one. I have to admit, this is one of the things that's really pushed me in this research project and diving into what the Bible has to say about the works that He's created for us. I had this perception you have a vocation, you have a calling, you have a job, and then when you're not doing that, you're off.

Dave Wilson: Yeah.

Ann Wilson: Right. Most of us think that way.

Don Everts: Yeah, we do, and especially we introverts. It's like, well, I'm not in the church right now, so I don't have to talk to you. But actually, and Luther helps us see this, that vocation, the works that God has for us, are all the roles and responsibilities that God has placed you in.

So what that means is I have a vocation as a father. That's one of my vocations in life. That's one of the works that God has prepared for me ahead of time to do. It's not just that I'm incidentally a father because I had kids, or it's not like I have to parent because these kids live in my house. Ahead of time, God prepared this vocation for me.

Ann Wilson: And He's not saying, "Oh no, Don's a father."

Don Everts: No, like, "Oh, what do I do now?" Ahead of time, "I want you to be a father. I also have a vocation as a son. I have living parents. What's that work that God has me? I have neighbors, so I have a vocation as a neighbor. I have a vocation as a spouse, as a husband. And I'm a pastor, yeah, that's on the list, and writer."

But what I love about that is it kind of blows up—when you read Ephesians, it's one thing to—what Paul isn't meaning is, you got to have a job.

Dave Wilson: Yeah.

Ann Wilson: You got to make a living.

Don Everts: He does write in Ephesians: in everything you work at, work at it as if working for the Lord. So he does talk about labor and our posture in our labor. But what he's talking about there is it is so heady, it should stop us in our tracks.

Like you guys now, you're grandparents. So you have a vocation as grandparents. One of the works God has prepared for you ahead of time is as grandparents. What I found as people dive into this material, boy, it makes them think. They just sit there going, "Well, what am I supposed to be doing as a grandparent? Am I taking that seriously? Am I thinking about that?"

Dave Wilson: Yeah, I mean when I hear you say that, that is life-changing mindset because I think it's easy—I don't know if women do the same thing, but as a guy—I bring energy to my vocation. It's important and I prepare and I feel like I'm supposed to and I don't often think the same way about being a husband or dad until you just used that phrase it's your vocation. I'm like, wait, I've got to do something?

And I think some of it's mindset. We don't think this is as important as what I do to make money to provide for my family. It's actually more important.

Don Everts: That's right. The temptation can be drink the coffee because I want to be amped up, I go into work, I give it my best, and then I come home and collapse and rest. I'm in that collapse mode while being a spouse and a parent. Am I giving it my best? Am I using my gifts in that place?

So there's something about thinking about calling and vocations. There's another place where Paul wrote in Corinthians where he said, "This is to be my rule in all the churches: Live the life that God has assigned to you and to which He has called you." Those two verbs—assigned and called—he actually uses in other places in a redemptive way, that God actually assigns people for salvation and calls people to come to faith.

So what Paul is doing there is lifting up as beautiful and dignified and spiritually significant our everyday lives. God has assigned us and called us to live a certain life and live in a certain way. That's part of faithfulness.

Ann Wilson: So Don, you're saying we each have an assignment. And maybe as we talked about at the beginning, several assignments that God prepared beforehand.

Don Everts: Several assignments. That's right. And then rather than—because sometimes we think about priorities. We got to set our priorities. And that's a really good conversation to have, right? But we tend to come to that with a sort of zero-sum, some things are going to get this, some things get that. But when you think about like I have vocations that I'm called to and that God has prepared me to.

It's not so that we're overwhelmed and it's like I can never rest. Yes, we're supposed to Sabbath, yes we should be off actually sometimes. But there's a richness in recognizing these assignments that God has given us.

Ann Wilson: I think just as I'm thinking about you as a listener, to take a second and to let that sink in. What is your assignment? Some of it will be obvious if you're a mom, if you're a son, if you're a daughter, a dad. But what else?

I love that we're talking about your book, *Discover Your Gifts: Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know*, because it's taking an inward look and thinking, "God, what did you put in me?" as we talked about with Psalm 139. And you talked about earlier in an earlier episode some gender differences even some of the data that you have found.

Dave Wilson: One thing that just hit me when you were saying about our calling and our assignment—being a dad and a husband and a wife and a mom is just as important as what I do in my day job. In some ways, I think we have to say—am I right or wrong? It's more important.

Because all the years I was a pastor at my church, I thought I was really important. And you know what? The day I left, they got another guy, and he's great. You're going to be replaced. But when you walk off the earth as a dad or a mom, nobody—and another dad can come in and that's beautiful and another husband—but you are the only person your kids are going to know in that way that it carries a little bit of weight. This really is the most important calling in my life. They're all equal, but there's a little bit of nobody else can do what I'm doing.

Ann Wilson: I feel like moms—that might be just a too broad of a generalization, but I'm always carrying that. Our kids, this is the biggest thing. Do you think that you, Dave, or men struggle with that more?

Dave Wilson: I was asking the expert. He said there were gender differences. Just confessionally, I would say yeah, totally. Totally. Did you find that in your research at all?

Don Everts: Well, there were some interesting gender differences in the research. The research doesn't tell us why the differences are there. So it's limited, but here's some of the differences that we noticed. We asked people (and we've talked about this previously) this baseline question: how gifted would you say you were on a scale of zero to 10?

How gifted would you say you are? We really described what we meant by that because the research people know how to do that, to make sure we actually get the answers that we're looking for.

Dave Wilson: Was there anybody who said they were a 10?

Don Everts: Sure. Oh yeah. I don't think a lot. I think the national average, if I have this right, was about six and a half, about 6.7 was the average. The average for women was lower than the average for men. Interesting. So that's an interesting data point. Women on average (and it wasn't by a lot, but it was about a point) and it was consistent.

So that's what the research nerds call statistically significant. That's meaningful. Why is it that women's self-perception is that they're less gifted? Some of the possibilities—one of those is, well, on average, men spend more time in the workplace. Here's an interesting thing about the workplace. When we ask people other questions about where are your gifts noticed? The workplace is high up there, like a boss.

When we ask the question, where have your gifts been developed and invested in to help you grow in them? The workplace is high up on the list. Is that possibly one of the differences between the genders? That's something to think about. We don't know exactly why it is, but I think it is important that we recognize that.

To get back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of vocations and all the things that we do. I remember when my wife—she was a campus minister and then we had our first baby. She was more the primary caregiver—we shared it, but she was the more primary one. She really wrestled with it. "I'm watching this baby, and I'm changing diapers."

Ann Wilson: Yeah. My words to Dave were, "I have no life."

Don Everts: "I have no life." I think a slice of that—what does spirituality look like then? Because I can't take a day of Sabbath when I have to feed every three hours. How do I get a day of Sabbath? I think part of it is, "I'm not doing ministry like I used to, I'm 'just' taking care of this baby. I'm 'just' a mom."

That's what I love about the doctrine of vocation. The biblical doctrine of vocation says there's a vocation of being a mother, which means that is a work that God has prepared for you. It is beautiful, it is dignified, it is important. God notices it, you can grow in it, you can be mentored in it, etc., etc. So I don't remember what the question was that I was answering, but that's one of the differences that comes out in terms of gender.

Where are people mentored? More African-Americans say they found mentoring in their gifts in the church context. Among whites, that's lower, and it's more found in school and at jobs, in an occupation. It's just something to think about as we're thinking about how do we celebrate people's gifts? How do we notice those gifts? How do we help mentor people in their gifts?

Dave Wilson: That's where I want to go. Let's talk about mentoring because you talk about it in your book and you did some research on there. As a parent, we're called to mentor our kids. As a follower of Christ, I'm called to make disciples—that's mentoring. So what can we learn? How do you draw out gifts in the people that you're mentoring?

Ann Wilson: And how have you done it? Because you're a researcher, you're a pastor, you're living this with your three kids. And how have you applied that over the years with your kids?

Don Everts: Yeah, that's a great question. It's powerful to notice in the scripture that, as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. We have that in the Proverbs. We tend to think about the spiritual discipleship in terms of raising people in the faith and helping them grow in their relationship with Jesus. But one of the things that we see in the scripture is that there are a lot of mentoring relationships.

One of the scholars that I was reading said it's kind of always part spiritual and then part technical. You see leaders influencing other leaders. There's also a biblical precedent for helping people grow not just as disciples of Jesus, but to help people grow as parents or grow as businesspeople or grow in their vocations.

One of the things with my kids—and I stole this from someone else—someone told me how their parents wanted to encourage them to try things and to grow in things. Whenever they tried something and failed, their parents would bake them a cake and they would throw them a party. Really? Yeah. This was a guy I was interviewing, writing kind of a biography.

I remember him saying to me, "Don, think of the confidence that gave me. Every time I tried something new and took a risk, even if I failed, my parents celebrated it and I got a cake." So with my kids, trying to encourage not just, "Read your Bible" and be this certain way. During the lockdown, the initial lockdown in the COVID days, my two older kids, who a lot of their life had been at each other's throats, were close in age and so it was just natural.

I celebrated and helped fuel them. My son liked doing a lot of TikTok and my daughter's an artist. They wound up starting a company with each other during the COVID lockdown. They called it Adrial Collective. My son was the entrepreneur and he did all the e-commerce stuff and my daughter was creating the artwork and they were putting them on t-shirts and sweatshirts and all that sort of thing.

My wife and I had this talk with them. They were saying, "We want to do this, Dad." We had helped them have this discipline of saving money. They were both about to finish high school. We wondered if we should let them spend their money on this. I told my wife, "I want them to do it. I'm not going to tell them this, but I'm going to back them. If they lose all of it, I'm going to pay them back. But I'm not going to tell them I'm going to do that."

The reason I was doing that was I wanted them to develop. I think my son has entrepreneurial gifts. How do you develop entrepreneurial gifts? You start things. It's risky to start things. You take risks. So, literally investing in him, noticing that gift—and I don't have it. I don't have that gift. But he has these different gifts. So, celebrating like, "Try it! Try it!"

I think that's one way. There have been plenty of ways I feel like I haven't done great as a parent in doing that. But that's one of them, to just be a cheerleader for our kids and notice things in them. I think you would do great at doing that. The whole mentoring process is really about people trying things and not doing them perfectly. Then you celebrate the effort, but you come along like, "Well, what if you tried this differently the next time?"

That's what we all need. That's what I need. Trying to do that with my kids, not just, "Don't be bugging each other," but try things and do things that are different that I don't know how to do.

Ann Wilson: I love the cake idea. Isn't that wonderful? Holy cow, what a great idea because you feel so worthless when you fail. But to have the parent celebrate like, "But you did it! Way to go!" And it helps you learn like this is maybe not the area I'm intended to use my gifts and they're not there.

I remember I think I was 19 and I heard a woman speak and she had this big graphic picture of a funnel on the screen. I thought, "That's interesting. What's the funnel for?" She said, "When we're younger, we should try as many things. The funnel is wide at the top. You're just throwing all kinds of ideas in the funnel."

The older that you get, you're going to realize, "Oh, that wasn't me. That wasn't me." But you begin to learn as you get older like, "Oh, this is it. This is my gift." We've seen that in our own kids. I forget how old we were when someone said, "Raise your kids according to their bent."

Dave Wilson: Yeah, their giftedness. That's what it was.

Ann Wilson: Totally. And so it made us start looking for our kids' gifts and they're all so unique and different. And we started celebrating those.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, somebody taught me that better than anybody—it was her dad. In some ways he did. He was a factory guy most of his life and he would say, "I'm not very gifted," but he really had a genius productive manufacturing mind. He was one of my coaches in high school and this was before I was dating Ann.

I am on a ladder at a dairy in our little town because I got a summer job my sophomore year. I'm 15 and I'm at the top of this ladder on a sidewalk and her dad, who I knew but didn't know great, looks up and goes, "Wilson, what are you doing up there?" I looked down and he's way down there. I'm scared to death by the way. I'm up there shaking.

I have to get this caulk out of these windows because my job all summer was all the dirty work. He looks at me and he goes, "Come down here." Because I respect the man, I came down and I stood there and he goes, "This is a waste of your life. This isn't what you should be doing this summer." I'm looking at him like, "Okay, I'm going to go back up the ladder."

Before I did, he said, "You're an athlete. You're a scholarship athlete. You will get a D1 scholarship. Your summer should be throwing a football." I quit the job that day. I went home and told my mom. She goes, "What? Dick Barrett told you you should do that?" And I got a scholarship. He saw what I probably didn't even see but also thought that's sort of a waste of time.

He said, "No, that's something you're good at. You're going to make money at this. You're not going to have to pay for college." He mentored me in that way. He did it when our oldest son came up to see us. He said, "Hey, CJ, I'm going over to see this guy. He's a robotics guy. You're into that kind of stuff, let's go." I remember watching CJ just light up as he walked into this room. That's calling out the gifts in people.

Don Everts: I love the story because this is practical for parents. Sometimes we don't have what it takes to mentor our kids in their bent. I remember my son, he was always so mechanical and he'd say, "Dad, can we build a spaceship?" This would be my answer: "I could write a short story about someone who builds a spaceship, but I can't build a spaceship."

I remember meeting this guy at church who had some engineering job. Talking with him, I found out he builds spaceships with his kids all the time. I invited him to have a relationship with my son. My son had gone to heaven. It was this incredible thing. There's something cool—we know that faith sticks more if kids have five adults who are believers in their life.

Out of the Fuller Institute, one of the things they found that correlates with kids having their faith stick once they become adults and go to college is if they had five Christian adults in their life on their team besides their parents. There was a guy with my oldest at church and I just said, "I was wondering if you could be on Simon's team."

He asked what that meant. I said, "I don't know, but I read in this book that you're someone who has this totally different bent that's more like him. Could you just talk to him in church every now and then?" That guy wound up being Simon's first boss. That guy was a small business owner. It's okay that we bring other people in. It takes a village.

I also try with other people's children to say, "Man, I noticed this about you and this is a great thing." I think a real practical thing we can do when we see other people up on a ladder is to bring other people into our children's life and say, "I want to help you develop in this area, but I'm no good at it."

I remember when my son started pitching the baseball so hard it hurt my glove. I had a hard time seeing the ball because I wear these progressive lenses now. I need to get some other baseball people in your life to help push him in ways that I can't. There's kind of a parental wisdom in that as well. In the scriptures, you see this kind of iron sharpening iron. We're made for that. We're meant to be influenced and to influence other people.

Ann Wilson: And it also refers back to your findings when people were asked to rate their gifts from one to 10 of do they have any? Will you say it again?

Don Everts: Yeah, so how gifted would you say you are? Zero to 10. The people who say zero are disconnected. That's one of the features that they have.

Ann Wilson: And so think about it, it's so easy for our kids to isolate more than ever now because they're in their rooms, they're on their phones, they're on their computers, they're on their anything. So to be intentional to bring people into their life that will speak life to them, to help them on that journey, discipling and mentoring.

Dave Wilson: And I would add—we put this in our *No Perfect Parents* book—pray that God would bring those people into your son or daughter's life. And God did for us. But when you pray that, then you look. And you're like, "Is that an answer to prayer? Oh hey, could you—" It literally changed their life. It changed ours.

Ann Wilson: Well, this has been a great discussion with Don Everts. Again, his book is called *Discover Your Gifts: Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know*.

Dave Wilson: And you can pick it up right now if you'd like. Go to familylifetoday.com and just click on the link in the show notes and you can buy it there. We know life is full of challenges and families today need biblical truth more than ever. As a FamilyLife partner, your monthly gift helps bring the truth into homes every single day through podcasts, events, and resources.

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Dave Wilson: And we have resources to help you as a parent and you can go to familylife.com/parentinghelp. FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported ministry of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.