Why burying what God gave you is the one investment strategy that never pays off
Every church has one. That person who can sing like they swallowed a hymnal but only does it in the shower. The guy who could teach a Sunday School class that actually holds a room's attention, but he's convinced himself he's "not a teacher." The woman who bakes like she's auditioning for a Food Network show, feeding half the potluck, and still says "oh, it's nothing" every single time.
We are surrounded by people quietly sitting on something good. And more often than not, one of them is you.
The Parable Nobody Wants to Be In
You know the parable of the talents from Matthew 25. A master heads out of town and hands his three servants different amounts of money to manage while he's gone, five talents, two talents, one talent, each according to his ability. Two of them get to work. They invest, they trade, they double what they were given. The third one digs a hole in the backyard and buries his talent, then hands it back later looking pretty proud of himself for keeping it safe.
Here's the part that always gets skipped over in the Sunday School version. The master doesn't come back and say "well, at least you didn't lose it." He calls the guy wicked and lazy. Strong words for somebody who technically didn't do anything wrong. Except that's exactly the point. Doing nothing was the wrong thing.
That servant wasn't punished for failing. He was punished for refusing to try.
And here's a detail worth sitting with for a second. A talent wasn't pocket change. Depending on which scholar you ask, a single talent could represent something like fifteen to twenty years of a laborer's wages. So the servant with the smallest amount still had something enormous in his hands, not a hand-me-down, not a consolation prize. He just decided it wasn't worth the risk of doing anything with it. That's not a story about a guy who got shortchanged. That's a story about a guy who had plenty and chose the shovel anyway.
Gifts Are Never Really About You
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that our talents are personal property. Mine to enjoy, mine to hide, mine to bury in the yard if I feel like it. But that's not how the parable works, and honestly, it's not how gifts work at all.
The servants in that story weren't given money to admire. They were given it to manage on behalf of someone else. That's the whole picture of stewardship, and it applies just as much to your ability to encourage people, or fix things, or organize a chaotic church event, as it does to money. Whatever you're good at, you didn't invent it. You were handed it. And you're the one responsible for what happens next.
That reframes the whole conversation, doesn't it. It's not "should I use this gift." It's "who is this gift for, and what am I doing keeping it in a hole."
Paul says it plainly in 1 Corinthians 12, when he's talking about spiritual gifts specifically. Different gifts, same Spirit handing them out, and the whole reason for the variety is "for the common good." Not for your resume. Not for your own private satisfaction, although there's nothing wrong with enjoying what you're good at. The common good. Your gift was never issued with your name as the final destination. You're a waypoint, not the finish line.
Why We Bury Things in the First Place
Nobody sets out to bury their gift on purpose. It happens slowly, usually for reasons that sound pretty reasonable at the time.
Fear is the big one. The servant in the parable said it himself, he was afraid of the master, afraid of getting it wrong, so he played it safe. That fear shows up in church life constantly. Fear of being asked to keep doing the thing once people find out you're good at it. Fear of not being good enough compared to somebody else who seems to have the same gift, except louder and shinier. Fear of standing out in a room where blending in feels a whole lot safer.
Comparison does its own quiet damage too. It's easy to look at someone with five talents and decide your two aren't worth unwrapping. But the master in the story never compared the servants to each other. He measured them against what they'd been given, not against each other's pile. The guy with two talents who doubled it got the exact same praise as the guy with five. Faithfulness was the measure, not volume.
And sometimes it's just busyness. Life gets loud, the calendar fills up, and the gift gets set aside "for now," which has a funny way of turning into forever if nobody interrupts it.
There's a fourth reason that doesn't get talked about much, and it's a sneaky one. Sometimes we bury a gift because using it would mean admitting we've been sitting on it too long. There's a strange kind of pride in staying hidden. If nobody's ever seen what you can do, nobody can tell you it wasn't good enough. The hole in the backyard isn't just safe. It's comfortable. And comfortable has talked more people out of obedience than fear ever has.
What Pouring In Actually Looks Like
This is usually where people expect a big dramatic call to action, quit your job, start a ministry, go be a missionary somewhere with no Wi-Fi. That's not usually how it goes. Pouring into your gifts is almost always smaller and slower than that, and honestly a lot less glamorous.
It looks like the guy who's good with kids finally saying yes to helping in the nursery instead of ducking out the side door during announcements. It looks like the woman who writes beautifully finally showing someone else what she's been keeping in a notebook. It looks like showing up to practice the thing badly for a while before it gets good, because growth has a beginner phase and there's no skipping it.
Faithfulness with a little is what earns more, according to the parable. Not perfection with a little. Faithfulness. That should take some pressure off, honestly. Nobody's asking you to be excellent on day one. They're asking you to stop burying it.
It's worth saying plainly that pouring in usually costs something. Time you didn't think you had. The discomfort of being new at something in front of people who might remember it. The awkward stretch where you're clearly still figuring it out and everybody can tell. None of that is a sign you're doing it wrong. That's just what the early part of using a gift feels like for almost everybody who's ever done it. The two faithful servants in the parable didn't get a guarantee their trades would work out either. They took the money and went and did something with it, risk included. Investing always carries risk. Burying just trades risk for guaranteed loss, and calls it safety.
When Nobody Claps for It
One thing that trips people up is expecting the gift to be received the way they imagined it would be. You finally teach the class, and three people show up. You finally sing on the team, and nobody says a word to you afterward. You finally offer to help with something, and it gets reorganized by someone else within a week.
The parable is quiet on this point, but Scripture as a whole isn't. Colossians 3:23 tells us to work at whatever we do as working for the Lord, not for people. That's not just a nice verse for a coffee mug. It's a release valve. If the audience for your gift is ultimately God and not the room, then a quiet response doesn't mean you got it wrong. It just means the applause was never really the point to begin with.
This matters because a lot of gifts get buried a second time, right after they were first dug up, simply because the reception wasn't what somebody hoped for. Don't let a lukewarm Tuesday talk you back into the hole.
The Return on Investment
Here's the thing about pouring into a gift instead of hiding it. It grows. Not always the way you'd script it, and not always on your timeline, but it grows. The two servants who invested didn't just keep what they had, they doubled it. Use tends to multiply what hiding never could.
And there's a ripple effect that the parable doesn't spell out but plays itself out constantly in real life. Your willingness to use what you've got has a way of giving other people permission to use theirs. The singer who finally joins the worship team might inspire the quiet guy in the back row to pick his guitar back up. The teacher who finally leads a class might be exactly what convinces someone else that their gift matters too. Gifts poured out tend to start a chain reaction.
There's also a version of growth that has nothing to do with getting better at the skill itself. Sometimes pouring into a gift grows you, the person, in ways you didn't sign up for. Patience you didn't have before. Humility that shows up right on schedule the first time something you built doesn't go the way you planned. A closeness with God that tends to show up when you're depending on Him to help you do the thing you said yes to, instead of just watching from a safe distance.
The Hole Is Optional
At some point, every one of us has to decide what to do with the thing we've been handed. Bury it, where it stays safe and useless and exactly the same size it started as. Or pour into it, where it costs a little more, risks a little more, and grows into something that outlasts the effort it took.
The master's not looking for five talents from someone who was only given one. He's just looking to see if you dug a hole or got to work.
So what's buried in your backyard right now. And what would it look like this week to go dig it up.
