Let me share with you my story.
When I was entering into teenage life, I was failing in school. I was terrible in sports. I felt I had no talents.
Thus, I didn’t know what to do with my life.
One of my cousins said that with my looks, I should join the movies. I blushed. “Why movies?” I asked.
He said, “Horror movies need skeletons.” (If you think I’m thin now, you should have seen me when I was 12. I was very good in Hide and Seek. My playmates would have to hide behind posts and plants. I didn’t have to do that. All I had to do was just stand sideways and I become invisible.)
Because I knew how to draw, someone said I should be an architect. I liked the idea of drawing houses—until I learned that you needed to be good in math to be an architect. But I didn’t like math. Attending a math class to me was slightly better than the torture they do to captured terrorists and slightly worse than a root canal without anesthesia. So I dropped the whole idea of becoming an architect. And I asked myself, “What jobs can I do that has nothing to do with math?”
Someone told me, “You can be an illustrator of a comic strip.”
I liked that idea. Because every day, I read Dennis the Menace, Snoopy, Beatle Baily, Blondie, and Tarzan…
So I started creating my comic strips, laughing the entire time. I thoroughly enjoyed my jokes. But when I showed them to my friends, they weren’t laughing.
So I was lost. I really didn’t know what to do with my life.
But God came to my rescue when I was 13 years old. I joined a small prayer group and our prayer group leader, Aida Manongdo, a mother six kids, saw something in me.
What did she see? She saw a gift. She saw an anointing. She saw something in me that I didn’t see in me. I remember her walking up to me, a peepsqueaky, shy, clumsy, awkward 13 years old boy. I was thin. I was not very bright. I was ugly (emphasis on past tense). And bravely, she said, “Bo, God told me that He has given you the gift of wisdom.”
Wisdom? That was my gift? Not drawing? Not my horror movie looks?
She made me give a talk to our prayer group of 30 persons. It was lousy. But she asked me to talk again and again and again. And the rest is history.
Friend, God gave you a gift.
Why? Because God believes in you. If He did not believe in you, He wouldn’t have given you that precious gift to bless the world.
God has entrusted you with a gift so special, if you don’t share it, the world will be a poorer place.
Right now, you may be asking, “Bo, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have a gift. And if ever I have a gift, it’s not really a gift. I’m not really good in anything.”
Hear me out: God does not give fruits, only seeds.
The reason you think you have no gifts is you’re looking for fruits. Don’t look for fruits. Look for seeds. For little signs of potential that can blossom into genius.
Grow your gift!
Fan the flame.
May your dreams come true,
Bo Sanchez
