I'm Not Enough (And That's OK)

The meme shows up in my Instagram feed at least three times a day. “You are enough,” it tells the exhausted mom of littles, torn between the demands of her kids, her husband, and her job. “You are enough,” it tells the driven woman who just keeps banging at the glass ceiling that won’t seem to shatter. “You are enough,” it promises the discouraged, the failures.

It’s well-intentioned, designed to be encouraging. It offers the weary an opportunity to rest. It helps us understand that it’s OK to go to bed and try again in the morning.

But it’s wrong. Or maybe it’s just incomplete.

See, I’m not enough. I don’t want the responsibility of being enough. I’m a fallible human in a shell of a body that betrays me. I start with the best of intentions, and some days my anxiety wins. Some days, I watch my children embrace the broken world view that I’ve fought so hard not to pass down. I see my oldest worry whether his body is big enough…good enough…and I realize that he grasped my own insecurities, the ones I tried so hard to hide. I go for a run – the race I trained for months to run – and my body gets sick. I’m twenty minutes slower than I hoped, and I can barely will myself to the finish line. I go to bed without cleaning the dishes in the sink. I put off the work project because I’m so frightened of failing that I can’t find a way to get started. On the 22^nd hour of trying to soothe the colicky baby, I put him in his crib, lock myself in the bathroom, and join him in screaming.

I am well-intentioned and hard-working, but I am not – and never will be – enough. I am, as Paul puts it, a “jar of clay”, prone to cracking, breaking, and crumbling.

Fortunately, my story doesn’t end there. And neither does yours.

I am not enough. You are not enough. But God? God is absolutely enough.

He has a way of taking the shattered remains of my striving and binding them together into something more beautiful than I imagined. He takes my halting first steps and multiplies them into a marathon. He stretches my “not enough” into more than enough. He makes all things beautiful in His time. His power is made perfect in weakness.

It takes a great deal of faith to relinquish control of our outcome to an unseen God, but the freedom I find there is indescribable. When I accept that God uses – and welcomes – my weakness, I find the freedom to start the scary project because I don’t have to control the outcome. I can trust it to God. When I trust God to order my steps, I can make my best decisions with confidence. I can relinquish the pressure of raising perfect children, choosing instead to point my children toward Him and letting Him complete the process.

When I leave the “enough-ness” to God, I can finally take the scary first steps.