Matthew 25:14 Meaning For It Is Like a Man

You have been entrusted with something of immense value, though you may have forgotten it. Your life, your consciousness, this very moment of awareness, these are the goods delivered into your keeping. The giver does not stand over you; you are left free to use them or let them lie.

To bury the gift is to live asleep, dulled by thought, sleepwalking through your days as though awareness were nothing. To use it is to be present, to let life flow through you fully awake. The gift is your own consciousness, and it grows only when you spend it, by bringing your full attention to the life you are actually living.

The man travelling into a far country is your own awareness stepping down into the world of experience, and the goods he hands his servants are the talents, the measure of imaginative power given to each person to use. Every one of us receives this capacity, and it is delivered, not lent for admiration, but placed in our hands to work.

The far country is the distance between where you now stand and the fulfilled state you long for, and the whole account turns on whether the power entrusted is put to use or buried. A talent held unused shrinks, while a talent exercised on the assumption of the wish already fulfilled multiplies into fact. What you do with your imagination is what your world becomes, and the servant who uses it inherits the kingdom he was given to build.

Each person is handed something at birth, a set of gifts and possibilities that are truly ours to use. The master who leaves and entrusts his goods is a picture of this. We are given raw inner material and then, in a sense, left alone to see what we will make of it.

The far country is the long distance between what we are given and what we finally become. No one stands over us forcing the work. The gifts are simply placed in our hands, and the whole of a life is the answer we make to that trust. What we do with what we were given is not decided for us. It is left, quietly and completely, to each of us.