I remember that morning exactly.

I remember what I was wearing – I remember that I didn’t eat breakfast because I was nervous. My mom and her friend drove down to hear me speak and took me to Potbelly for lunch afterwards. I had stood on stage at my university chapel and preached my guts out, a message I felt God had written and given me to share.

And everything went just as it was supposed to, the arrow hit the bulls-eye and God really moved. But as soon as I got off the stage, everything changed. I bumped into my favorite professor who had taught my Advanced Public Speaking class and in that fateful moment she looked at me with tears welling up in her eyes and said “Rachel, you have an unbelievable gift. I can’t wait to see how God uses it.”

My face turned flush and in that moment I took her words and planted them in my heart. My email inbox started to fill with requests to speak at churches and youth conferences. Fellow students stopped me in the hallway and thanked me for my timely words. Though I tried to display an outward humility, each of these things became fertilizer to a new weed growing in my heart: I was extraordinary, and God couldn’t wait to use me.

I was graduating soon and didn’t have a career path in front of me, so I set my eyes on self-promotion – I wanted to be the next best thing in Christian preaching circles. I was young and inexperienced – but I had the only two things I thought I needed: passion and the gift of teaching.

By God’s grace that day in chapel ended up being the ceiling, not the floor. I agreed to speak at a few different places but each of them turned out to be more miserable than the last. I couldn’t seem to put two words together and every time I sat down to prepare I would beg God to give me another inspiring message, to which He remained utterly silent. During one talk I gave at a women’s conference I barely made it through my intro and a group of women in the back whispered and quietly exited. I went back to my room after my talk and yelled at God – what is happening! Why can’t I speak??

A few months later I found myself living in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and not a single person knew about my gift. I was washing dishes and making pies most days and no one cared about that part of my life. I had a major identity crisis – who am I when I’m not on stage? Who am I when my gifts are not the first thing people see in me? (I even tried to write a book in that season, hoping it would get my speaking career back on the trajectory of greatness).

But my gift disappeared, almost as quickly as it came. It would be years before another opportunity to teach came my way.

During this time I heard a teaching on spiritual gifts that sort of blew my mind. And what was so mind-blowing about it wasn’t the depth of the teaching, but the simplicity of it.

This pastor shared about how we often hear the word “gift” and quickly think “gifted” – as if it is a quality or a talent we possess for life.

But the Bible doesn’t say spiritually “gifted” – it refers to all of these things as spiritual gifts.

A spiritual gift is simply a gift – something God gives you that He wants you to give to someone else.

It’s not necessarily something we possess (people who have the “gift” of healing aren’t always able to heal – just like those who have the “gift” of wisdom aren’t always wise). A spiritual gift is something God wants to give to someone, and He’s using you to deliver it.

That morning in chapel the Lord had a gift to give to those people, a powerful message to help them see Him in a new way – and He chose me to deliver it.

Not because I have this insane, rare talent for speaking (although I do love to talk) – but because before that moment in the hallway I genuinely knew how much I needed God’s help to be able to do something like that.

I don’t teach much anymore (but I hope to more in the future, because I do enjoy it) – but I’ve found the best question I can ask as I prepare any teaching is “God, what gift do you want to give them? I want to deliver it for you.” Because if I’m left to my own devices I will likely gravitate towards giving them the gift of Rachel Kleppen – seeing every opportunity not as an one to make God look great, but to make me look great.

And I think this can happen with any spiritual gift.

I love hospitality and having people over, but often times my heart can shift towards impressing my guests with my cooking or my cool apartment rather than simply blessing them. (God has often used burned or poorly timed food to help cure me of that one!). But when I step back and think of each opportunity as a one-time gift to be given to someone from God I feel so much freedom!

Rather than being the gift, I just get to deliver it.

What are your spiritual gifts? I hope you get many chances to give them away.