The NEW Parable of the Talents

At Christmastime our church likes to put on a little informal Christmas concert starring the kids.  They ask all of the children if they'd like to sing a carol or play an instrument or do something musical with their family.  They ask EVERYBODY so that everyone feels included.  The problem is, that the Skillman family, who have no musical talent whatsoever,  really truly don't mind being excluded from this sort of thing.  Really.  But each year these do-gooders always insist we do something so we don't feel left out.

So a few years back, in serious desperation and under great duress, we went searching for a talent.  ANY talent.  After looking high and low, and really really low, I remembered a friend that had chimes cut from metal pipes.  It looked like just the thing for our family to attempt.  It wasn't too serious of an instrument, and really, how hard could it be to bang a bunch of pipes with a few metal rods?

Hard.

First, right off the bat, let me just warn you: if you're a family prone to physical outbursts and unruly bantering, it may not be a good idea to try an instrument that gives each person in your group a metal object with which they could bludgeon another family member with should they get frustrated or annoyed.

It was a solid hour before we managed to get through a short little song without a single mistake.  A long bruised up hour.

Yet, last year our first performance went off without a single glitch. We called it our Christmas miracle.  But...instead of acting like professionals by taking a silent bow and returning reverently to our seats, we were so surprised that we actually pulled it off that we dropped our own jaws in awe and wonder and then started giving each other hearty congratulatory high-fives.  We totally blew our cover and everyone knew we were shocked at our own expert performance.  Not only that, we'd disrupted the reverent tone of the whole event by our high-fiving and excited gyrations like the kind you see in an END-ZONE.  Not real churchy if you know what I mean.  Our stunt pretty much chased the spirit out of the room like some sort of reverse exorcism.

This year they actually asked us back again.  (There seem to be no limits to the kindness of Christians). So out came the #@!% bells and another round of horrific chime practicing and metal bludgeoning commenced.

Last Sunday was the big day and our performance turned out...uh...unique.  This year Mark forgot a couple of notes and luckily Connor, who in practices could NEVER get it right, suddenly got the hang of it and would casually tap his dad's bells when he'd forget.  It got to be pretty comical.  Mark would miss a note, Connor would hit his dad's pipe for him and then Mark would audibly say "Oh!".

ting, ting, "Oh!" ting, ting,"Oh!"

As you can imagine, we were quite the spectacle. However, the good part about being so bad was that there were no congratulatory high fives or lewd victory dances at the end of this year's meager performance.

Perhaps this is the year that will get us uninvited from these types of things.  All indications point to our family getting shunned next year because the gal in charge came up to Mark afterwards and said, "Maybe you should bury that talent."

Apparently, our family has single-handedly maxed out Christian kindness AND changed the biblical thinking on whether or not one should hide their talents.