Jacquelyn Lopez
Systems Simplified. Operations Sharpened. Marriages United
A Business That Keeps Working After You Close The Laptop
The Parable of the Talents and the CEO Wife Who Buried Hers in Busyness
You know the parable. A master gives three servants talents according to their ability. Two invest what they were given and it multiplies. One buries his in the ground out of fear, and returns exactly what he was handed, nothing more.
We usually read that story and picture the third servant doing nothing. Idle. Passive. Afraid to move.
But there is another version of burying a talent that looks completely different on the surface. It looks like constant motion. Full calendars. Twelve-hour days.
A woman who is undeniably busy, and yet somehow, her actual gift, the thing she was uniquely built to do, never gets the room it needs to multiply.
Busy Is Not the Same as Invested
The two servants who multiplied their talents were not simply active. They were strategic. They put what they had toward something specific, and it grew because it was aimed at a purpose.
A CEO wife can be busy every single day and still be burying her talent, if that busyness is scattered across everything except the thing she was actually gifted to do.
She answers every email personally instead of building a system. She says yes to every request instead of protecting the work only she can do.
She fills her calendar with tasks that feel productive but never actually advance the specific calling she was given.
That is burying a talent while looking incredibly busy doing it.
Why This Happens
Fear rarely looks like sitting still. Fear usually looks like frantic activity that avoids the one thing that actually matters, because that one thing feels exposed, vulnerable, and risky.
It is safer to answer a hundred small emails than to build the one offer that puts your real gift on display.
It is safer to manage the logistics of the business than to lead the vision of it. It is safer to stay busy than to risk investing your actual talent and finding out what it can, or cannot, do.
The servant who buried his talent said he was afraid. That fear is still alive today. It has just learned to disguise itself as a full calendar.
How to Stop Burying What You Were Given
Name the actual talent. Not your job title. Not your task list. The specific thing you were uniquely built to do that only you can do the way you do it.
Audit your calendar honestly. How much of your time each week is actually invested in that talent, and how much is busyness that avoids it?
Give the talent room to multiply. That might mean delegating the tasks that are not your gift, so the thing that is your gift finally gets the space and attention it needs to grow.
The Return You Were Meant to Give
You were not given your gift to protect it by staying safely busy around it. You were given it to invest, to multiply, to bring back more than what you started with.
Busyness feels productive. But productivity and investment are not the same thing. One fills the day. The other multiplies the calling.
Stop burying it in motion. Start investing it on purpose.
The Built for Both newsletter helps CEO wives identify exactly this kind of misalignment every Saturday.
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"Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; So he will have no lack of gain." Proverbs 31:10-12