There is a headline making its way around this week about Ariel Fitz-Patrick, who has become one of the funniest voices on the Christian internet, and the part I keep turning over is not the punchlines. It is three words tucked into the headline itself: never meant to. She did not set out to build an audience. She was being herself, noticing the small comic truths of church life, and somewhere along the way people started following along because it made them laugh and it made them feel seen.
I like stories like that. Not because everybody should go make videos, but because it is a small, ordinary picture of how God actually hands out gifts. Rarely by application form. Usually by surprise.
The Spirit distributes; we discover
Paul, writing to a church that was arguing about whose gift mattered most, put it plainly: "All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills" (1 Corinthians 12:11). Notice who does the apportioning. Not the committee. Not the gifted person. The Spirit decides, and then a life gets rearranged around something the person never chose off a menu.
That is worth sitting with, because a lot of us carry a quiet anxiety about calling. We imagine there is a sealed envelope somewhere with our name on it and we are behind schedule opening it. But look at how it usually goes. A woman notices she can make people laugh, and it turns out laughter is medicine for a tired church. A man finds he cannot leave a broken thing alone, and thirty years later half the widows in the county have his number for when the furnace quits. Somebody discovers that when they pray for a person, something in the room settles — and it took a friend saying "you should keep doing that" for them to notice at all.
None of them meant to. The Spirit meant to.
Laughter is not the enemy of reverence
Some folks get nervous when humor comes near holy things, and I understand why — there is a kind of joking that thins everything out until nothing is sacred. But joy that comes from actually knowing God is a different animal. Listen to the people coming home from exile: "Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy... The LORD has done great things for us; we are glad" (Psalm 126:2-3).
That laughter is not silliness. It is the sound of people who could hardly believe what God had done. Their mouths filled up with it because their hearts had already filled up. Reverence and gladness are not competitors; in Scripture they are usually roommates.
And be honest about where that psalm comes from. It was written by people who had wept a long time first. A few verses later they are still praying about sowing in tears. If you are in that part right now — praying and waiting, believing for something that has not come, dragging yourself through a Thursday — the psalm is not scolding you for a lack of laughter. It is telling you where laughter comes from and that God is not finished. You do not have to perform gladness to belong here.
Somebody needs the thing you shrug off
Here is what I notice leading people: almost nobody values their own gift. The thing that comes easy feels like it cannot count. You can cook for forty without breaking a sweat and you assume everyone can. You remember names. You sit with people in silence without needing to fix them. You hear a nudge to text somebody and you text them, and they tell you later it landed on the worst day of their month.
That is not personality. That is the Spirit apportioning, and He is doing it right now, in Ravenna and Muskegon and every place people gather in Jesus' name. He did not stop when the New Testament was finished being written. He is still handing things out, still surprising people who never meant to.
So pay attention this week. Not with striving — with curiosity. Ask the Lord what He has already put in your hands, and then ask a couple of people who know you well; they will usually tell you faster than you will admit it. Then do the small obvious thing with it. Make the call. Bring the meal. Tell the joke. Pray for the person in the parking lot.
Jesus did not gather a team of specialists. He gathered fishermen and a tax collector and some women whose names the world had no reason to remember, and He filled them with His Spirit, and they turned out to be exactly what the world needed. He is still doing that. You may never mean to be useful. He means to make you so anyway — and that, in the end, is something worth laughing about.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.