I (Nancy Nair) am reading Romans 12:6-8. Wow — if we could do this, our world would be so different!

We all have different motivational gifts, according to God’s grace. If a person’s gift is prophesying, let him/her use it in proportion to his/her faith. (7) If it is serving, let him/her serve; if it is teaching, let him/her teach; (8) If it is encouraging, let him/her encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him/her give generously; if it is leadership, let him/her govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him/her do it cheerfully.

It is a fact that God has made us unalike. Yet, we seem to expect everyone to think and act as we do. This usually causes hurt feelings that go uncared for. Wouldn’t it be great if we had been taught to understand God’s design about motivational gifts as we grew up?

If you had the gift of mercy, and you married someone who had the gift of being a prophet, wouldn’t it be nice to know what God’s intentions were when He put those motivational gifts into both of you? You would use your gift the way God intended it to be used. The same would be true if you were a server, a teacher, an encourager/exhorter, a giver or a leader/organizer marrying a person with a different gift. Wouldn’t you want to know how people with two different gifts could live happily in the same house together?

Now let’s really get into this. Let’s say you have four children and each of them has a different gift. There could be six different gifts running around in your home! And then let’s say your parents have different gifts, and you have two sisters and two brothers with different gifts…well, with each person thinking differently than you do, you can imagine how important it is to understand each gift.

If I were young and thinking about dating, I would want to know how my “other half” thinks and acts. I would watch how he responds to his family members. If he had a sister who had the same gift as me, and he treated her a certain way, then he would most likely treat me the same.

It is even important to know why you do not get along with a person. To not get along with someone means it’s likely that you do not understand how God designed that person to be, and also that both of your spirits have been wounded. As it says in Proverbs 18:14, “the spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity, but a wounded spirit, who can bear it?”