Real & Ordinary

There are some gifts that I have always wanted God to give me. I have always wanted to be able to play a musical instrument and sing. God has not seen fit in His will to give me those gifts. In fact over the years as I have looked at my life I am about as average and ordianry as you can get. I have no great abilities. I resented God for years because I saw so many other people with these awesome abilities and I had none. Then just about five or six years ago in the middle of one of my "poor me" parties, God spoke to me and it shocked me what He said. God told me to stop whining. He pointed out to me that He had given me two gifts. One was that I was ordianry. The fact that I was ordinary allowed me to connect with people and for them to identify with me. You see most of us are ordinary or at least that is the way we see ourselves. So when we encounter these people with their extraordinary abilities we are blown away by them and many times put them on a pedestal and not really see ourselves as being able to achieve what they have. Trust me! I am not somebody that anyone would ever put on a pedestal. I don't want to be on one because the only place you can go on a pedestal is down. I have come to enjoy the gift of being ordinary because when God uses me and others see what God has done and tell me that they could never to do what I did, I can honestly tell them that they can because if God can use me, He can use anybody because I am very ordianry.
The second gift God has given me is the ability to be real. In the early years of my ministry I tried being a traditional minister. I even tried to develop the ability to sound like a praecher, to have preacher voice. I couldn't, it sounded stupid and so I gave up. At the same time that God showed me my gift of being ordinary, He also showed me that He had given me the gift of being real.
Being real means you are who you are, you doing things not like others, but like who you are and you don't hid things well. Like you don't hid when you happy or sad or mad or discouraged. Being real sucks sometimes because you would really like to hid stuff and you can't and it gets you into trouble or it ticks people off. But being real is also a very cool gift from God because it allows Him to much more easily Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls of your life. Being real allows God to say things through you that really nice people would never say. Being real has to be tempted with a lot of love. If not, it then just becomes rudeness and that is not of God. So now God is teaching me, at time very painfullessons, on how to be real and ordinary with love.
Joe