When I worked as a Bone Marrow Transplant Nurse Practitioner, part of my job involved performing bone marrow biopsies.

If you’ve never had one, I pray you never will, because they’re painful, awkward, and usually require you to be wide awake to perform.

During the several years I performed them on patients, I had an unusually high success rate.

In fact, I can only remember ONE time that I wasn’t able to get a successful sample.

At one point, a newer provider came to shadow me, because she wanted to see what I was doing that made my procedures so successful.

She watched me go through the whole process, and after we left the room, she said:

“Okay. They definitely did NOT teach us that in nursing school.”

I asked what she meant, and here’s what she said-

“Lee, you practically got into the bed with the patient!”

While she was joking, she wasn’t totally wrong in her description 😂

I realized that I consistently put my knee and part of my leg “in the bed” in order to position myself to get the best possible angle for the procedure.

She said something like, “I didn’t think we were allowed to do that.”

And I remember thinking…

Wait- AM I allowed to do that?

So I walked through my method.

I always asked the patient for consent and explained how I was going to get the best possible angle to “only have to do this once”

I always made sure they were comfortable with where I was positioned.

I always protected their personal space and dignity.

And I was doing it for a GREAT reason: Adjusting my position gave me a better chance of getting a successful sample the FIRST time, thus sparing this person from having to repeat a traumatic procedure.

I realized that I had unconsciously developed an approach that followed the rules, worked for me, AND served the patient well.

Years later, I had an especially satisfying full-circle moment when one of my former nursing professors watched me perform another bone marrow biopsy procedure on her loved one.

She happened to run into my mom years later, and when she found out we were related, she told my mama that I was one of the best practitioners she encountered during her friend’s illness.

Y’all - she SAW me put my knee in the bed, and still said that 😂

That experience made a huge difference in how I understood myself as a High Responsibility Human.

Because we often spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to produce good results using someone else’s method, and never try to find what works best for us.

Yes, doing certain parts of a procedure in certain ways is VERY important.

There are safety standards, ethical boundaries, wisdom, expertise, or practices we absolutely need to learn and respect.

AND- within those boundaries, there is often room to develop the way YOU achieve a successful outcome.

In learning how to discern when I could do it my way, I realized I needed to be able to say yes to 5 key questions:

1. Is this safe?
2. Is it ethical?
3. Does it honor the person I’m serving?
4. Does it produce good fruit?
5. Does it allow me to use what I’m good at well?

And this way of evaluating my methods doesn’t just apply to life-threatening procedures.

In fact, I’m literally using it while creating the content for this Grow In Your Gifts launch!

I know that I create better content when I don’t try to make every email the best thing I’ve ever written.

I just…write. And hit “publish”. And let some of it be average.

And I’ve stopped requiring every idea to prove itself worthy before I allow another human to see it.

I learned a while ago that giving myself permission to create imperfectly helped me become incredibly consistent, which over time makes me SO MUCH BETTER at creating content.

My “mediocre” becomes “excellent” in the long run, because I get more reps in doing what feels more natural.

I’m share these examples because they highlight something VITAL for spiritual gift formation.

Identification gives us a starting point. Development requires practice.

Builders need opportunities to build and learn how their action produces fruit, so they can execute more effectively over time.

Judges need opportunities to practice discernment across different people, situations, and contexts, so they can better know when to speak up and share what they sense (or quietly pray about it instead)

Professors need to move understanding into application, so they can uncover what they still DON’T know/understand (and go back to the lab and learn more)

Coaches develop through participating in real growth and getting a better sense of how encouragement, challenge, patience, and release each serve different moments, so they can confidently encourage others to grow well.

CEOs develop through actual responsibility, delegation, coordination, and decision-making, so they can better lead in ways people love to follow.

Consolers develop wisdom around presence, connection, care, and emotional boundaries, so they can better alleviate suffering when others need it most.

And Stewards develop by making real decisions about resources and observing what those decisions produce, so they can better allocate and manage valuable assets.

We learn to use our gifts by paying attention to what happens when we USE them.

We gratefully receive the feedback (from God and others), we examine the fruit, we adjust, and we go do it all over again.

That is a huge part of what I designed Grow In Your Gifts™ to do:

To serve as a formative environment where you can better understand what God has entrusted to you, practice using it more intentionally, examine the fruit it’s producing, and continue developing it over time.

Because the goal isn’t to become the textbook version of your gift.

The goal is to find the best way for you to “get in the bed” and be as successful you can, by being YOURSELF.

​JOIN GROW IN YOUR GIFTS™​

Faithfully rooting for you,

Lee

P.S. If you haven’t identified your Primary Motivational Gift yet, take the free assessment here: TAKE THE ASSESSMENT. Then come join us for the part where we actually practice developing it. 🌱