Every time my wife shares stories about her workday, I’m always impressed. As a preschool teacher, she spends her days not only teaching her little ones about numbers, letters, and colors but also managing their energy levels. I don’t know how she does it, but I do know God has given her the gifts to thrive in that setting. I, on the other hand, know full well that God has blessed me elsewhere. If you were to put me in her classroom, I wouldn’t last ten minutes.

God has blessed you and me with gifts with which we can love him and others, and not all these gifts are alike. You might have gifts to teach young children, while someone else has gifts to run a large company. Even though our gifts can be vastly different, they are all important and useful for serving God and building each other up. However, there’s something that often stops us from using our gifts to their full potential. That something is called comparison. Instead of celebrating the different gifts God has given us, we look at the gifts other people have and end up feeling like our gifts aren’t good enough. It’s easy to complain when we see someone else thriving with so many talents that ours seem worthless in comparison. This especially hurts our desire to serve others because it destroys our contentment in the gifts God has given us.

The amount of gifts you have doesn’t define your worth. God is pleased when you faithfully use your specific gifts to serve him and others. In Jesus’s parable of the talents, a master entrusts his servants with different amounts of money—five talents, two talents, and one talent—while he is on a trip. When he returns, he sees that the first two servants were faithful in their work and doubled their money. The master doesn’t praise the servant with ten talents more than the servant with four; he gives both of them the same praise, word for word. “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share in your master’s happiness!” (Matthew 25:21, 23).

God sings your praises when you use the gifts faithfully that he has already entrusted to you. The way you do that is by remembering the One who gave you your gifts in the first place. Every gift you and I have been given, as different as they are, comes from our loving Father, who gave everyone the greatest gift of salvation through his Son. “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work” (1 Corinthians 12:4-6).

God has blessed you with specific gifts so you can serve him faithfully as the best version of yourself—one who knows your worth is found in being a child of God. God did not create you to live as someone else. He will never ask you to be anyone other than who he made you to be—his beloved child. The amount of gifts God has given you has never and will never be a measure of how much he loves you. So whether you’ve been blessed with five, two, or even one “talent,” your Lord is proud when you use all your gifts faithfully to his glory.