I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills.—Exodus 31:3 (NIV)

People say my handwriting is hard to decipher, and I admit it’s probably gotten worse through the years. But compared to the great novelist Charles Dickens, my scrawl looks like calligraphy. That’s because Dickens wrote many of his notes in a personal shorthand based on an obscure eighteenth-century style of stenography he learned as a young court reporter and then modified over the years. 

One of his notes for a letter he sent to a newspaper publisher—the letter itself has been lost—had famously remained undeciphered by intrepid but baffled Dickens scholars for 163 years until the University of Leicester posted it online recently and offered a small cash prize for anyone who could make sense of it. 

Someone did. Not a scholar. Not a linguist. Not even an amateur Dickens buff. No, the man who broke the cipher had never read a Dickens novel in his life and had only made Cs in literature. He was a computer technical support specialist from California. The runner-up was a twenty-year-old cognitive science major at the University of Virginia. 

The subject matter of the note was mundane—Dickens protesting the newspaper publisher’s refusal to run an ad. But these non-literati types cracking the code was rich with irony . . . until I thought about it. Wasn’t it more about the different gifts God gives people? This time they were used to decipher an obscure note from a famous author. But imagine the problems we can solve when we all share our unique talents and work together.