(ThyBlackMan.com) If I may be so bold as to borrow the title of W.E.B Dubois’ essay The Talented Tenth, I’d like to build on my previous blog entry entitled America’s Got a Talent.
~
The Talented Tenth
a.k.a.
Heavy D and DuboisTithing a tenth of
Your talents testifies to
How God has blessed you.
~
In doing so, my goal is to highlight the one aspect of this parable that doesn’t immediately translate from the metaphor of the coins (referred to as 
talents) each servant was given relative to the actual talents that God has given each of us who are tasked to use them for the advancement of His Kingdom.
To rephrase this into a formalized question: How do you make your talent earn a return on its investment a la the good servants in Matthew 25?
In an attempt to relay the message of this parable to youth and young adults, I’ve constructed a workshop that plays out the distribution of coins based on a game where scriptural and secular questions either gain or take away from a stash of coins each participant is given at the start of the game, respectively. My intentions were to explicitly show what happens when you put your talent into secular things (the earth). However, it was not until I wrote America’s Got a Talent that I focused on the flipside of the equation.
The flipside being: How do you create a return on investment for God with the talents He’s given you? Simply stated, what you do with your talent should activate and inspire other people’s God-given talents.
One of the reasons I wrote my book last year was to inspire young men to pick up a pen and put it to paper with the goal in mind to write books instead of picking up a mic to be a rapper. This is not to say that Christian rappers aren’t using their talents correctly; rather, it’s meant to show the diversity of how one’s talents can be used. If I executed it correctly according to what God has given me, the attempted lyricism within the book should allow young men to see that incorporating God into your talent can be just as (if not more) impressive and lyrically superior as the albums of today’s best emcees.
Have I created a return on God’s investment in doing so? Yes. On a smaller scale, after hearing about how I’d decided to invest in myself by self-publishing my book, friends and family alike sprouted up to confess how they had ideas for books that they had wanted to write but hadn’t developed. My book says “If I as your brother, cousin, friend, nephew and/or son can do it, so can you!” Take your gift to cook, memoirs and creative stories and turn them into a book! Dedicate that book to the people of the Lord as you keep Him in mind throughout the creative process.
On an indirect scale, I recently heard a testimony from one of the members of my church who purchased my book for her nephew. Apparently, he had trouble effectively expressing himself in the past and kept things bottled up within. Knowing how that can eat away at a person from the inside out, the young man’s aunt thought that my book might help him. In a church meeting just this week, she fought through tears as she testified on the significance of a wall post he put on Facebook that read (paraphrasing): “I now know how to put pen to paper to express myself.”
On a more direct and larger scale, I’ve had an opportunity to encourage a young man who had the same gift as me but struggled (as I did for awhile) with how the secular world was affecting said gift by way of music and other cultural influences. He said he’d read an article of mine on AHH and was drawn to my site. Once he began to peruse my blogs, he reached out to me to let me know how my style of writing had inspired him because he hadn’t yet seen someone who could effectively deliver a God-centered message enmeshed within decent enough lyrical context. Over the course of the next few weeks, he further expressed how he’d stopped writing poetry because he knew it was opening doors to the darker influences within him that he didn’t want to put to page as a Christian.
This interaction which I was blessed to experience occurred towards the end of 2010. I reached out to my brother in Christ during Resurrection Sunday (Easter to most) just to see how he was doing because we hadn’t exchanged emails in a while. His response was awe-inspiring and put both of our talents into the correct perspective. He informed me that he’d started writing again and had even been asked to share his spoken word during his church’s celebration of Christ’s resurrection!
These experiences are not meant to be boastful of myself but are meant to serve as real life examples of how one can effectively increase the talent God has given us according to the parable in Matthew 25:14-30. Just as readily as entertainers inspire our youth to act, rap, sing and cook for the world, Christians should be showcasing their talents as unashamedly God-given and dutifully returned to its source with interest!
So try God. Start out just as you would with tithing and devote 10% of your time and talent to God’s work and watch it increase.
The following are scriptures typically referenced in the Bible regarding forgiveness and tithing but are just as applicable for the distribution of one’s talents:
‘Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.’ – Luke 6:38
‘Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed Me. But ye say, “Wherein have we robbed Thee?” In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed Me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in Mine house, and prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.’ – Malachi 3:8-10
Staff Writer; Reggie Legend
Can find more about this writer over at; http://www.steelwaterspoetry.com
Also available as a Keynote Speaker – Book him Today; Speakerwiki – Reggie Legend
