The 13 spiritual gifts, plainly

Spiritual gifts get talked about like a color-coded chart on a projector. Here's the version we wish someone had given us in our early twenties: 13 short definitions of how the Spirit tends to move through people, written in the voice of Tuesday, not Sunday.

• Teaching. You can take something complex and make it obvious without making it small.
• Leadership. People end up looking at you when it's time to decide. You didn't ask them to.
• Administration. Chaos in, order out. You can see the plan five moves ahead.
• Shepherding. You keep track of people. Not their names — their stories.
• Evangelism. The gospel comes up in your ordinary conversations without effort. You can't help it.
• Mercy. You feel other people's pain in your body. Comfort flows out of you before you think.
• Encouragement. You leave people stronger than you found them. Sometimes without saying much.
• Giving. Generosity is your reflex, not your discipline. You'd rather quietly cover it than talk about it.
• Hospitality. You make strangers feel like they've been coming for years. Your table is a doorway.
• Faith. You believe God for the next thing before there's evidence for it, and it doesn't cost you sleep.
• Discernment. You can feel when something is off in a room, a meeting, a plan. You're usually right.
• Wisdom. People bring you the tangled situation. You return it untangled.
• Knowledge. You gather truth — Scripture, history, context — and pull the right piece out at the right moment.

You don't need every gift. You need to know yours, and then trust the body for the rest.