Thoughts from my kitchen as I’m making dinner and thinking about how I don’t want to go back to work: I think the phrase “being enough,” although often used in attempted encouragement and with positive attentions, often ends up ultimately inflicting damage misses the point of the Cross.
I am currently doing quite a bit of translating work – translating from Japanese to English. In the course of doing this, I am VASTLY aware that I am lacking, and not only that, but there are times when the client I am working for, as well as the translating platform I am working through, echoes those thoughts through poor reviews and rejected pieces of work, so it’s not just a matter of listening to destructive lies. And if it is not just the lies of the devil, then that means, to some degree that the work that I am producing is “not enough.” My knee-jerk reaction to that is, “Well, even if this work isn’t enough, I am totally enough. I am more than enough!” And while the reaction is a positive indication of my mental health and my connection to my Lifeline, that reaction got me thinking about “being enough,” and my fear of “not being enough.”
Validly, the work that I am doing is not representative of my value as a human being. I am not just the work that I do, although it is a reflection of me in some way. And likewise, the person that I most care about the most’s opinion of me, and what He says of me, is far more weighted than any one-time client or work portal, but I was just interested in visiting and spending time with this phrase.
As I did my mental exercises for the day, I arrived at thinking that I don’t think it is necessarily wrong for me to think of myself as “not enough.” I am not enough. I will never be enough. This is why I need God; this is why I need Jesus. I don’t think it’s just a matter of knowing that Jesus loves me, and finding my “enough-ness” in that (although that is True); it’s about taking the entirety of “enough” and the scales of worldly “enough-ness” and throwing them at the feet of Jesus. It’s the complete ripping of the train from the tracks. For, in the end, it isn’t about ME being enough, so I don’t think I need to defend myself, debating and trying to persuade myself that I really actually am. I am not enough. And I don’t have a problem with that, because Jesus is enough, and I have Him.
I think it’s a matter of working through the concept of “because He has done this, we do this.” I was not enough, and Jesus had to die for my sins because of this. This is True. But because He loves me, He was WILLING to do that, because only He could do that for me. Only He could be enough. And because He loves me and sacrificed Himself on the Cross for me, I am now imputed with the power to be able to love others and love myself. I, myself, Allie do not NEED to be enough, because my Jesus abides in me and He remains enough. That still doesn’t make me enough, because I am me (although He is making me new), but I am now able to look at his “enoughness” and claim it as my own.
When I share my doubts and fears with others, they often try to comfort with me by saying: “You are more than enough.” Although I appreciate the sentiment, it doesn’t necessary save me from my current reality of “ not enough-ness” that viciously whips at me every day of my life in all the roles that I play. In the end, the thought that helps me the most is that it’s not about being enough, let alone more than enough. I think it’s about being MORE, and firmly standing in the fact that I am MORE than just a wife, that I am MORE than just a daughter, that I am MORE than just employee, that I am MORE than anything that this life currently has on me right now.
So, I am not “more than enough” in the terms that I am full and complete and sufficient and adequate. But I am “more than enough” in the construct that I am beyond just what is “enough” and what is “not enough.” I am entirely off the rails of the spectrum because of what Jesus has done, and what I have accepted as Truth. Because in the end, it’s not about me. And it’s not just about what has been imputed to me through Christ – it is all about Christ and who God is. I don’t necessarily want to hear that I am good enough. I am not good at all. And while this may sound a little defeatist, in the end, it is actually freeing, because it takes the pressure off of me to be what others try to tell me to be. Because, in the end, it just points me back to where I need to be: on my knees before the One who is sufficient, who is necessary, who is my cup and my portion – to the One who is truly more than enough.