Discovering Your Giftedness
In this episode, Dr. Darrell Bock, Dr. George Hillman, and Bill Hendricks discuss giftedness, focusing on the importance of discovering your giftedness.
Timecodes
Transcript
- Darrell Bock
- Welcome to The Table, we discuss issues of God and culture, and our topic today is giftedness and we'll probably get a little bit into the relationship between faith and work and where God has you, those kinds of questions. We think God knows what he's doing, but we're here to talk about how that works. And my guests are such good friends we're gonna have a good time, so I've got George Hillman to my right and I'm getting your official title, I'm reading it right out of the catalog –
- George Hillman
- It's a long one, yeah –
- Darrell Bock
- So I get it right, I mean he's Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Ministries and Leadership, now that used to be Christian Ed, right?
- George Hillman
- The old Christian Ed in the Spiritual Formation and Leadership departments, we merged those two departments together.
- Darrell Bock
- Okay, so we're now, it's now a new wedding, a new family –
- George Hillman
- That's right; we're like the Brady Bunch.
- Darrell Bock
- Okay, well that I believe, and then I've got Bill Hendricks here to my left who's just come on board as the Executive Director for Christian Leadership at The Hendricks Center, is that right?
- Bill Hendricks
- Correct, correct.
- Darrell Bock
- So welcome aboard Bill –
- Bill Hendricks
- Thank you –
- Darrell Bock
- We're here to discuss as we talked about giftedness in faith and work and in particular get in a little bit into this book that Bill has written called The Person Called You: Why You're Here, Why You Matter, and What You Should Do With Your Life. And now that I'm 60 you know, I get this.
So –
- George Hillman
- It's not too late for you –
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, that's right, well I got, you know, 10, 15 years, maybe I'll be productive. Anyway, so it's a real pleasure to have you all with us. And I thought the way we would start, just to kind of get the ball rolling is to have each of us kind of tell our stories about how we ended up where God had us and kind of what the signs were along the way or maybe where there weren't signs, where we were struggling to kind of sort that out. And Bill, I know a little bit of your story, I'm gonna let you start, so tell us how'd you end up where you are?
- Bill Hendricks
- Well in a way it goes back to about age 30, my wife Nancy said to me, "Listen, I've put you through two master's degrees and you know, I'm tired of doing that, I want you to get out there and make some money 'cause I want to stay home and have babies." And she kind of called the question, but the truth of the matter is, I didn't know what to do with my life. And people were saying, "Oh but Bill, you know, you went to Harvard, you've got these two master's degrees, you could do anything you want?"
- Darrell Bock
- So what were you prepared to do?
- Bill Hendricks
- Well I had a degree in English and then I had a degree in mass communications and a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies here from DTS.
- Darrell Bock
- So you could have done the Bible, you could have written, you could have mass communications was with what?
- Bill Hendricks
- Well you could go into corporate communications and write PR releases and stuff like that, and that kind of interested me except that I really didn't know anything about the corporate world –I didn't come from that background. And I was just lost at that point. I didn't know what to do, and it was about that time that somebody put me through the process that I now use to help people figure out what their giftedness is and therefore really clues as to their calling. And it was like somebody turned the light on in a pitch black room, it was just like, "Oh my gosh, now I get it, now I know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life."
- Darrell Bock
- And you've been basically doing that ever since and consulting and helping people kind of get located in terms of where they're headed –
- Bill Hendricks
- Yeah, exactly.
- Darrell Bock
- Once you landed, you're helping other people land.
- Bill Hendricks
- Yeah, I mean it didn't happen overnight. Initially I was doing communication projects, writing ventures, publishing ventures, video, people that had a message and they needed a medium and a strategy, and I'd help them figure that out. One of the people that I helped with was the guy who had developed the process that I use, and I'd always had such respect for him. And he was having trouble getting a manuscript published, and so he cried "Uncle" and let me get in there and help him. And I realized as I was working on this project how taken I am with this phenomenon of human giftedness, and I just decided to reinvent my consulting practice around it so that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years is helping individuals think through their strategic life and career directions.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, so in the midst of talking about your having joined the seminary and the center, I actually forgot to mention your role with giftedness, why don't you tell people what you do?
- Bill Hendricks
- Yes, I also have a consulting practice called The Giftedness Center based here in Dallas, and as I said we work with individuals to help them think through their life and career directions. The simple way that I explain that at a party or something when people ask me what I do is I say, "I help people figure out what they're gonna do when they grow up." Everybody gets that and most everybody will say, "Oh then I need to come see you." And these are often very successful people but what I've discovered is that for many, many, many baby boomers in particular, even if they're successful in life they live with this angst about, "Yeah but what should I have done with my life?" And of course with the millennials, their children, the question, "What should I do with my life?" is like
T-H-E number one issue on their mind, and everything else kind of has to salute that because that's so determinative.
- Darrell Bock
- Right, exactly, George what's your story?
- George Hillman
- Yeah, so in kind I think my story come in two parts of how did I end up in ministry and then the craziness of how I ended up here at Dallas Theological Seminary, you know I always tell people I keep waiting for them to figure out what are you doing here at the seminary, love the job. Had gone to college, I originally was gonna be a park ranger, loved the outdoors, to this day, was a biology major, and got down to chordate anatomy in organic chemistry –
- Darrell Bock
- So it wasn't Smokey the Bear that did it to you?
- George Hillman
- No, no it wasn't Smokey the Bear, I still would love to be Smokey the Bear at times, but just realized I loved the lab aspect, I loved certain aspects, but then there are aspects I just really didn't love, but I love people. I mean I'm a people guy and I love that stuff. And so graduated with a social work degree, ended up with Boy Scouts of America, still love Boy Scouts, it was a combination of outdoors plus –
- Darrell Bock
- People –
- George Hillman
- People, both those types of things. But in the course of even doing that, great job, had great independence, I only had to go in the office two days a month, I mean how good is that? But God was still just kind of working on my heart and we actually switched United Way agencies, switched from Boy Scouts of America to YMCA, and we moved to Ft. Worth to start seminary. I just thought oh, I'll take a class here or there, you know and eventually you know I'll figure things out. While I'm taking classes along, working at the YMCA, my wife is teaching school, and it finally got time to the internship. This is why I love internships here at the seminary, and I had to figure out what do I want to do with my internship. Well, I had a good college experience and so I thought well, you know I'd love to do some college ministry. And I had an opportunity to go to the University of Georgia for nine months to do an internship with what they used to call Baptist Student Union –
- Darrell Bock
- Oh yeah –
- George Hillman
- And that nine months turned into seven years, just it, as immediately once I hit campus, once I got involved there, I loved it.
- Darrell Bock
- Was it all at Georgia?
- George Hillman
- Yeah it was all at Georgia –
- Darrell Bock
- Well I didn't actually know that.
- George Hillman
- We were at UGA that whole time and doing stuff with Baptist Student Union, I also got involved with a Baptist Church there, my wife went on staff at the Baptist Church there and I was continuing on my seminary degree from a distance, those types of things, but we just loved our season that was there.
- Darrell Bock
- My daughter graduated from Georgia, that's, yeah, yeah –
- George Hillman
- Yeah I remembered the connection with stuff like that. Well, coming here, we moved back here to the Dallas area, we have family here, and I loved the opportunities to do internships. I loved the opportunities to work with students, and I actually developed a good relationship here on campus with Aubrey Malphurs. Aubrey used to run the internship program back then, and Aubrey said, "We're doing some changes here on the seminary. We'd love to bring in an outsider –would you remotely be interested?" I still love my church, I've been at my church 16 years, and I wasn't looking for anything. I didn't even have a resume.
But it's one of those things where God just came along, in both instances God just came along. And it wasn't what I was planning, but I look back and it absolutely fits perfectly. So here at the seminary, been here now 13 years, this is just glorified college ministry, I love being on a campus, I love the life-change, those conversations of what do you want to be when you grow up. And so for 12 years I ran the internship program here and just loved having, I'd have that conversation 300 times a year with students, easily and being able to place students around the world with things like that. Aand yeah, so my journey as I look back, it makes absolutely perfect sense. In the midst of it I had no clue where God was leading me on that.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, well my story's very similar, I was headed for radio, TV, and film, I was gonna be a sports broadcaster –
- George Hillman
- I knew that was –
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, and –
- Bill Hendricks
- It could still happen –
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, I know, and so I was clicking away, and then I came to the Lord in college, started a Bible study in our apartment with the guy I was rooming with my sophomore year. We started off with six people my sophomore year. By my senior year we had enough people coming to the Bible study, college age students that we literally were filling a four bedroom apartment and there were people in every room. We actually didn't have space to deal with everybody that we were dealing with. And then I took an adult Sunday school class at the church my senior year, and it went from like 12 to 120 in two semesters. And so it was kind of like maybe this is what I should be doing, so I went on to seminary, and I ended up here completely, kind of like your situation, I was just teaching along, I had talked to the seminary about perhaps coming back after five years, it was gonna be in Bible-Ex originally. And they ended up contacting, the day I brought my second daughter home from the hospital in Scotland I got a letter from Dr. Campbell saying, "Would you be interested in New Testament? They need to start a doctoral program, you're gonna be finished, they'll be in position to do that, would you mind thinking about New Testament instead of Bible-Ex?" And this is how profoundly I was thinkin: "I just need a job."
So I get to teach the Bible, if it's in English or in Greek, who cares, I mean you know, and I ended up here and I've literally been here ever since. And what's interesting is you think the radio, TV, and film start has nothing to do with what you're gonna do and what you're gonna end up –
- Bill Hendricks
- It has everything to do with –
- Darrell Bock
- It has everything to do with it, look at where I'm sitting, what I'm doing, and so it's exactly that reflection of looking back you can see God kind of playing with the pieces. I think sometimes He sits in heaven and says, "I'm gonna have fun with this," and plays it out that way. Okay, so the point is, is that I think it'd be fair to say probably that none of us have ended up doing what we thought we were gonna be doing at the start. I mean certainly, so that's an important lesson, that means you're not gonna necessarily always pin down what you're gonna be.
- Bill Hendricks
- That's very rare that people actually know from childhood what they're gonna do. Occasionally you find somebody who's precocious and knew from day one they wanted to be a sports caster or they wanted to be a journalist or whatever, but that's very, very rare.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, my son is kind of an exception, he's doing sports law and he knew in the eighth grade what he wanted to do and had literally pursued a career path to get there and checked all the boxes. In fact he checked additional boxes in talking to people, he says, "Well if I want to do this what should I do?" "You need to go to law school." He going, "Well that wasn't in the plan," but that's what he ended up doing and that's how he ended up, but you're right: it's the exception rather than the rule. I think about my own kids, they've wandered all over the place in terms of where they started versus where they've ended up.
- George Hillman
- Well we kind of joke 'cause we're talking before, I've got an 18-year old in college right now, we all stress about what's your major. Well, none of us are doing what we majored in, and so you know I think we put a lot of pressure on 18-year olds.
- Darrell Bock
- You know, that reminds me of something that you did in the book Bill, that I think is worth bringing up this point 'cause it fits so nicely, you have a way of saying things very gently. You said that parents tell their kids a lot of crock –
- Bill Hendricks
- Well the parents mean well –
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah that's right, so I figure well, I saw that and I went, "I'm gonna ask him about that." So when you were talking about those kinds of things, what kinds of advice do we often that if we thought about it we might take back?
- Bill Hendricks
- Well I think parents have the best intentions in the world for their kids but the parents will tend to suggest to the kids what works for the parents because of the way they see life, but they don't necessarily realize how their child sees life. And so they will recommend, "Well here's a field where jobs are growing, you should get into that," never considering is that a good fit for that child. "You should go to this college because I went there and it's a great school." Well, you haven't taken into account how your child learns and what kind of an environment they need. So I'll just say in general, parents often have expectations for their kids that have nothing to do with how this child is really put together. And I mean there's communities in the Dallas area for instance, where there's only, if you're a male, you're an 18-year old male, there's only about five or six career options that are really open to you. You can become a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a real estate guy, and if you're very fortunate and you make it work you can become an entrepreneur. But after that –
- Darrell Bock
- There's insurance sales –
- Bill Hendricks
- Yeah well in that community that's not even, that's a little suspect, God forbid you're a person who says, "I really want to play the cello." Oh, that's not really that acceptable, and I literally had a lawyer once I worked with. He was hating his job, hating life, wanted to find something else. I said, "Well how'd you get into law in the first place?" He said, "Well that's easy, when I was a senior in college a bunch of us fraternity buddies were sitting around one day and talking about what we were gonna do and these two guys that I was close to said, 'Well we're going to law school.' I thought, well that's pretty cool so that's how I ended up in law school." He literally gave it that much thought. And the problem is that our culture does not know how to get people from high school graduation into the adult world of work, and the result is that we now have tens of millions of millennials that are wandering around out here lost as lambs. And we also have countless boomers who actually faced the same problem in our day, and as I said earlier they're still wondering what they should have done with their life. You mentioned that you had 300 conversations a week with interns asking, “What should I do with my life?” It's much more problematic when people have graduated and gotten into work and now they're 40, 50 years old and they're saying, "What should I be doing with my life?"
- George Hillman
- Well another thing too, I don't know if you all have priced college here recently, I mean we're at a private school, it's $56,000.00 a year. So I'm putting down a quarter of a million dollars, and you know this, millennials, the job market, various things like this, my 22, 23, 24 year old is back home, not employed –
- Darrell Bock
- Boomerang –
- George Hillman
- Right, and I've spent all this money and so now what happens, the next parent comes along, and they ask me, "Well what should I do?" I say, "Well go to community college," and things like this. There's a lot involved with this, a lot of –you hear the student debt thing, all that's related together, all that's related together.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, we've done a while series of podcasts on what's called emerging adulthood or emerging adolescence that's talking about how the entry into what is defined culturally as full life, married, beginning to have kids, has been all pushed back almost an entire decade and the sociological impact that that has. I know my son, when I talk to him, he's single, he's in his thirties and he's, and I ask him about kind of what he's thinking and he says, "Well Dad, I really don't feel I'm in a position to get married 'cause I've got all this debt that I have accumulated and I'd like to get that a little more taken care of so I feel like I can provide for a family." So the dynamics of what's going on here and the whole idea of social pressure and how social pressure works on us to define who we are and what we do and the impact that it has. I mean your opening illustration of there's certain parts of the city where they're only five acceptable job categories even though there are myriads of possibilities of what someone could do, automatically limits what your options are in terms of what's acceptable for your family and your culture, that is a big impact. So part of what we want to do and talk about and think a little bit about is how do you mix and match, how do you take the way God made you and kind of figure out what God has made you to do, I guess might be the way to ask the question. And Bill, where do we start with that?
- Bill Hendricks
- Well you have to start with how God made you and I suppose even before that why is it important to start there? If you go all the way back to Genesis one, God speaks the worlds into existence but then when He gets to human beings He uses as it were with His own hands to fashion a man and a woman. The very first words that He says to those two people are in regard to their work, which tells you something about the importance of work.
- Darrell Bock
- Exactly.
- Bill Hendricks
- And He says be fruitful, multiply, rule the earth, make it fruitful. You know the earth on its own is not very fruitful, like I don't know when the last time you looked, but here's a mountain over here, and it's got ore in it. I've never seen a Mercedes Benz just come popping out of the mountain. The earth gives us raw resources, but only humans can add the value to make those resources useful. Well to that end, to make the world fruitful God has given each of us some form of giftedness by which to do that, that's how we add value, and we need all kids of giftedness in this world.
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, I call it the “Creation Mandate” and that putting the Creation Mandate with the Great Commission mandate is sometimes something we do not do and so we'll tell the gospel story but we won't tell the why God made us story. Well the why God made us story fits into why the gospel becomes good news and in living out the way you're designed to live is a very important part of living out the way life works. You know George, you work with, and you're responsible for a department that's called Educational Ministries in Leadership which sounds terribly impressive, at least I know we're getting educated leaders. But as you think about this question, the way God made us and how to begin and thinking about giftedness, what do you wrestle with particularly since you deal with a department that talks about shaping people and helping them think through how they approach life and their walk with the Lord?
- George Hillman
- Yeah, so as I think about the population at Dallas Seminary, and I do this with all my intro students, I really see the population, you can clump it into three groups. You have probably one third of our students who they came out of the womb knowing they were gonna be a senior pastor and all their life they heard that, or a missionary or whatever the case may be. Those are fun students to work with; you just gotta point 'em in the right direction and get them going. There's a middle third, that middle third is who I was, I knew I was supposed to be here but I wasn't really sure why.
The analogy I always say in class: God doesn't give us maps; He gives us flashlights. And I just knew the next step, the next step was to come here. And so this really became, seminary became an exploratory thing for me to try things and so as I was saying in my story, my internship changed my life. Those nine months, which turned into seven years, it changed my life 'cause I finally was able to see the pieces connecting. Then I think there's another third of students that just come to seminary and they're just saying, "Hey the church isn't giving me enough Bible, I want more theology, I –
- Darrell Bock
- Personal development –
- George Hillman
- A personal development, I don't plan on working at a church, I plan on being in the business world, those types of things. And so we're working with all three types of students and so especially for that middle group I want to be able to help that middle group to explore those things. This is a safe environment to go try some stuff. You think you're, you know we're doing chapel messages this week and we're hearing about China. Well, go to China, go for two weeks, go try and see these types of things. For this third group, the group that's my businessmen, the group that's coming here for their own personal development. I think a lot of times they look at these first other two groups and they think, "Well I'm not worthy, I'm not, you know. I'm not even sure I should even be here."
And so for this group it's really being able to come alongside them and showing them value, saying again, "It's wonderful that we have godly lawyers and doctors and businessmen who are making theologically sound decisions, that are dealing with the ethics and those types of things." And there's so many of those students that come, they say, "There's no place for me," and this is exactly where you need to be as well. So I think as a seminary, and I think that's a difference, maybe over the last 15 years or 20 years of seminary education is that our population has expanded. If you came to DTS 25 years ago, 30 years ago, preachers and missionaries, and now we have the entire gamut of folks. And so what we get to do is help kind of deal with all three of those populations. For that first group, that group who comes out saying, "This is exactly what I need to be doing," we get to come alongside and confirm, confirmation of calling. Illustration I give, y'all watch American Idol, and you'll see when they do the tryout shows and you always have that person who can't carry a note, but their mama told them they were the best singer. They get to come and they get to have somebody besides their mama, somebody besides their home church say, "You know you really are a good preacher, you really are a good communicator." And so we get to come alongside and confirm what their family, what some of their friends are saying.
- Darrell Bock
- That isn't where I thought that illustration was going –
- Bill Hendricks
- Simon and Cowell, you're gonna be Simon Cowell –
- George Hillman
- Well and you know what, for some –
- Darrell Bock
- You can't sing a note –
- Bill Hendricks
- He couldn't be Simon Cowell, you could be –
- Darrell Bock
- Yeah, that's right –
- George Hillman
- You be Simon Cowell. But there are, for some of those students, you need to sit down and say, "You know, I love you, but you can't do those things." And again, it's not a values thing, it's not this hierarchy of well here's the missionaries and here's the senior pastors and, oh sports lawyer, well that's lower on the totem pole. It's not that at all. They all have value in the kingdom; in fact that whole thing of God in His infinite wisdom created a closed system, and the resources that are there, and when we're able to unleash that in the church, it's amazing with what happens with those things. So again, our department gets to work with all three of those, we have the different conversations as we go along the lines.
- Darrell Bock
- And I think it's really, really important, I've seen this change in my lifetime here at the seminary I was telling Bill before we walked over, I'm in my thirty-third year here at Dallas. And when I came to seminary, I mean the bulk of people were headed for the church or were headed for teaching or were headed for the mission field. I mean para-church was barely tolerated you know, and to think about a person who was gonna be a full-time, in full-time business being here, well they must have a lot of extra time, I mean you know, so, and that's changing. There's a sense in which the appreciation of the person who's gonna give themselves full-time to a vocation but wants to get grounded as being the best equipped Christian they can be, whether it be to be a good elder or to just be a good Sunday school teacher or just for the personal enrichment of influencing the people that are around them. We have a lot more students here who are in that category and the cool thing is, is that that's being affirmed. That we haven't, we don't have this church and secular divide on the campus that says, "Well here are our primary citizens and then, we've got space for you." I think that's a very, very important development in the way things have been going. Well, let's talk about the search, your book Bill, is really about helping a person find, I would say not only what they do well but what they're motivated to do, which I would take is a way of saying, "What are you built to do?"
- Bill Hendricks
- Right, and you can never ask a person that directly 'cause the truth is they don't know. And it's not because they're not bright and they're not reflective. It's because each of us lives inside our skin and because you live inside your skin you can't see your own face, it's a physical impossibility.
- Darrell Bock
- You don't measure your impact; you can't measure your impact without someone giving you feedback.
- Bill Hendricks
- Right, and so the same is true for your giftedness, you live inside your skin and when you're using this giftedness that God has given you, you're not thinking about using it. You're just using it, it doesn't seem remarkable. You see other people's giftedness but you don't perceive your own and so somebody from the outside has to come along and hold up a mirror and say, "Here's what you're doing and here's the value of what you're doing." It's a little bit like your illustration of confirming, you do belong in a pulpit, but of course as we mentioned you’ve got the person who you go, eh, that's certainly not such a good choice for you.
Then they end up like Socrates of whom it was said he always had a voice in his head that told him what not to do, but it never told him what to do. And I find a lot of people know well I shouldn't do this, and I don't want to do this, and I'm not good at this, and I don't want that, but I don't know what I want to do. That's what I was at age 30. And you wish you had an owner's manual on yourself right, that told you, you know you work on a computer or a car, you check the owner's manual to find out what was this machine designed to do, what does it do best?
- Darrell Bock
- Well some people check the owner's manual.
- Bill Hendricks
- They should, you know what are the other pieces of equipment around this thing that make it effective, and the warning labels, whatever you do don't do that. Don't you wish you had an owner's manual on yourself and on other people? Well, I represent that there is a kind of an owner's manual, and it's this phenomenon of human giftedness that what we discover is that from the womb the person begins living a certain way, and it's by virtue of how God has made them. They get interested in certain things, they're motivated under certain circumstances, they use certain abilities that are instinctively natural for them, and they enjoy using 'em. They play different roles relative to other people.
And there's always a motivational thrust or outcome that they're seeking and so one person, they see life as a problem to be solved and so they're a problem solver. And over here is somebody who wants to build and develop and form and shape things, and over here is somebody who wants to get a response from people. And somebody over here wants to take an idea and make it real and so we find all these different forms of giftedness in the world and they're there 'cause God made people to do these things. And so we've gotta help people discover -well what is that owner's manual for me 'cause on their own they won't instinctively figure that out.
- Darrell Bock
- And so that's why community is important, watching people function is important, getting the feedback that's important in developing that, and affirming in some cases and saying, "Well maybe not." And I take it George, that's what you guys do in the internships is basically that process.
- George Hillman
- Well and in even our spiritual formation process here on campus as well –
- Darrell Bock
- That's true too, yes.
- George Hillman
- So the idea of the context of community, you will be amazed at how many times even I'll ask a student, "Well what does your wife think?" "Oh I haven't talked to her yet about this." And I usually tell them, "Well I can tell you what God's will is for your life, you need to go and talk to your wife about this," 'cause I do believe God calls couples. And so your wife and your friends, same type of thing, I agree with the idea of if I hang out with a person I can tell you what your giftedness is. I don't need to take a test; you discover these things in the context of the community, the discovery, but then also the fence on the other side of, "You know you maybe don't need to do," in loving, what we call courageous love to step out and say, "this maybe isn't for you."
- Darrell Bock
- And the shaping and forming that comes within that, yeah that's your gift but how do you hone that gift but how do you hone that gift, I mean that's a whole another element to the equation.
- Bill Hendricks
- Well one word of caution on the community piece because everybody, I guess not everybody but most people grow up in a family which is a form of a community, and actually they hear lots of things about their giftedness. Unfortunately, many of those messages get wrapped in a negative or shaming label, so like here's the person who's motivation is to get things right, they want things just so. Well what does their mom call them, he's a perfectionist, what does his dad call him, well he's anal retentive. Well that's a way of getting at the truth about that person but through an inherently shame-based label. If I ever have brain surgery, that's the guy I want on the job, the get-it-right person. I don't want somebody for whom you know, good enough is good enough.
- Darrell Bock
- Is that a brain or a heart?
- Bill Hendricks
- Half way through the procedure they're going, "Oops." But this person may live with a sense of shame 'cause they cannot not be who they are, but then when they live that out they're going, "Oh, there I go again, there's my perfectionistic tendencies." One of the things that I do in my practice is often reframe for people what their perception is of their own gifts and show 'em there's actually value in this gift. I had a woman coming to me once, and her gifting was all around what we call “combat prevail,” like you wouldn't have known it to look at her 'cause she was very diminutive. If she saw somebody being taken advantage of, it's like her claws would come unhinged and she'd pounce like a tigress, okay, and defend 'em.
So when we get to what we call the feedback session, I had sent her a report on her pattern and I always ask, "Well you read the report, what do you think?" She says, "Well I agree with everything in here." I said, "Well what did you think about it?" And she said, "Well you've just basically told me what I've known my whole life." I said, "What's that?" She said, "That I'm a troublemaker." And my heart just sank 'cause I could hear the teachers when she was growing up and her parents and a couple of ex-husbands; I mean there's a dark side to giftedness. But this pattern had played itself out and she'd been told she's a troublemaker. And I said, "Listen, you're not a troublemaker, you only make trouble for people that need trouble to be made." I said, "You're a warrior," and the tears started. She had never seen that that gift could have value and so many people live under this sense of shame about the very thing that God has given them, and I really think the evil one uses that to get people, to prevent people from using their gifts.
About the Contributors
Bill Hendricks
Darrell L. Bock
Dr. Bock has earned recognition as a Humboldt Scholar (Tübingen University in Germany), is the author or editor of over 45 books, including well-regarded commentaries on Luke and Acts and studies of the historical Jesus, and works in cultural engagement as host of the seminary’s Table Podcast. He was president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) from 2000–2001, has served as a consulting editor for Christianity Today, and serves on the boards of Wheaton College, Chosen People Ministries, the Hope Center, Christians in Public Service, and the Institute for Global Engagement. His articles appear in leading publications, and he often is an expert for the media on NT issues. Dr. Bock has been a New York Times best-selling author in nonfiction; serves as a staff consultant for Bent Tree Fellowship Church in Carrollton, TX; and is elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Dallas. When traveling overseas, he will tune into the current game involving his favorite teams from Houston—live—even in the wee hours of the morning. Married for 49 years to Sally, he is a proud father of two daughters and a son and is also a grandfather of five.
George M. Hillman
Dr. George M. Hillman Jr. serves as the Vice President for Education and Professor of Educational Ministries and Leadership at Dallas Theological Seminary. He oversees all seminary activities related to academic affairs and student life. Before stepping into this role, Dr. Hillman served as Vice President for Student Life and Chair of the Educational Ministries and Leadership department at DTS. As department chair, he oversaw the MA in Christian Education degree and the creation of the MA in Christian Leadership degree. He is also the former Director of Internships at DTS, where he developed the seminary’s ministry residency program.
Dr. Hillman came to DTS in 2002 with years of pastoral experience in churches and parachurch organizations in Texas and Georgia. He is the author or co-author of six books and several journal articles on theological field education, church educational ministry, and pastoral leadership.
Dr. Hillman has a BS in Sociology from Texas A&M University, an MDiv from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has a passion for education, spiritual formation, and leadership development.
He is a rabid college football fan and loves good barbeque. He and his wife have one grown daughter pursuing a career in the arts.
Contributors
