When You Feel Like You're Not Enough

 Do you ever feel like you're not enough? 

Like the voices that say your best is never the best and the lies that shout you'll never make it and the hollering that speaks death to all your dreams and hopes just won't shut up and all you're left with is crushed ambition and dashed spirit and you just feel it's easier to sit down and give up than to keep fighting to show up... 

Do you ever feel as though you're always less-than? 

Always striving to keep up but never quite making it in the eyes of those whose respect you most crave? Always giving it your all but always thinking you'll never make it to the top of it all and always feeling like you're dismissed, overlooked, overworked, undervalued, and someone is always just that one bit better than you are? 

And isn't it amazing how the un-truths that have been spoken over you can drown out THE truth and you can fail to hear the One voice that matters most over all the others whose words still follow you years after the fact? 

Ever since the beginning, we've been lured by the falsehood that what we were given wasn't enough and that we weren't enough and we needed something more to make us enough and life has since been a struggle to believe that the Savior who proclaimed on the cross, "It. Is. Finished" is the only One who can make us enough because He is enough. 

Fail to let go of the not-true and you can accept a version of you that is nothing like the real you He sees and all of our stories are a battle to come around to His way because that's the only way we find who we really are.

It's surprising how we just keep storing all the past fallacies, all the misconceptions, all the misbeliefs and hold onto them like our life depended on them. How we mull over things miles behind us in the journey simply because we can't let the power of those words go. How we continue to carry the burden of others' delusions about us when Love is trying to get us to see our beloved-ness in a way only He can. 

When God Himself is trying to breathe into us a sense of our chosen-ness, our one-ness with Him... here we still are, wrestling to rid ourselves of the endless myths that only call us back into places we'd rather leave behind and past selves we are desperately trying to change. 

All this world is a distortion and everyone is living a flawed version of who they were intended to be and only He can save us and allow us to become love like Him and use broken to make something beautiful. 

Speak to your failures and the failures of others and you'll never talk life. You'll never see what could be. Who could be. Because God is always re-making, redeeming, restoring. And all He's ever after is transforming. And turning into holy means letting all the not-right about yourself be forgiven in the eyes of Him who is All-Right because He never speaks to who we were but always to who we are now and who we will be in Him one day! 

The mind never forgets and all the falsities will stick with you if you let them. If you do not face them with faith, talking truth to that which the Enemy most wants you to believe, you will never be able to embrace the life God has for you or even grasp in the remotest way the incredible person He sees you as. 

Nobody on this planet "gets you" the way He does and all people at some point will talk down your potential, will silence your voice, will tell you all manner of lies just because they are unwilling to know the real you. The amazingly, wonderful, adopted, loved, forgiven you. The you that God deeply, passionately cares about. 

You can be motivated by inadequacy or you can be motivated by love. And the motivation that always goes places is the one that never accepts the taunts of others as truth. Instead believes, as said Mark Twain, that the truly great make you feel as though you can do anything and only the small people belittle the ambitions of others. 

The motivation that keeps you going is the simple fact that God has seen you at your worst and still decided to own you, select you, keep you, claim you, hold you. 

If the un-truths begin to get loud - if the insufficiencies start to roar - if the fears loom large - brave, bold, Grace-infused you doesn't have to give in to them. You can acknowledge them and admit their reality but you don't have to quit just because they are present. Because you have a God who fights for you and a God who is always with you and a God who forever reminds you not so much of where you've been but where you're going and He uses where you've been to get you there. 

So when you feel like you're not enough, you're faced with a choice as to who to believe. Believe the ones who see you with blind eyes or the One who saw you on the cross so long ago. Believe the ones who only wish to pull you down or the One who rose and now raises you. 

You get to decide what stays with you because, one way or the other, something always will.