{Be Real} When is Enough Enough?

We just celebrated thanksgiving, a time we focus on giving thanks for everything our hands hold, for everything God has given us. And from this place of thanks, we want to give back to God…and sometimes our hands can feel…empty. There’s that feeling in your gut, that feeling that maybe I do not have enough to give back to God. And the deeper feeling, maybe I am not enough. After my first post, one of our sweet friends asked me to write about this.

I know the “not enough” feeling. I remember feeling it acutely as a teenager. It stung my heart and left me feeling empty.

At the time, I was going to a church where I felt terrible listening to the sermons on a Sunday morning. I sat in the pews waiting for something encouraging. Waiting for someone to tell me some good news. And by the time it was over, I didn’t feel like I read the bible enough, or prayed enough, to be considered a real follower of Jesus. And worse, I received a list that in order to be a “disciple,” I needed to do all these things.

Imagine what that does to a young girl with low self confidence and perfectionistic tendencies?

And so, one Sunday morning I put on the TV to watch Charles Stanley speak before church.

My mom came in the room, and asked me, “Ker, what are you doing?”

I told her I was preparing to go to church.

And my mother came in to talk to me about it. She swept in to protect my heart in a way I didn’t know how to. We talked about why I felt I had to prepare to go to Jesus. And a few months later, we decided to go to another church.

Because you see, anyone that makes you feel you aren’t doing enough for God, doesn’t know God at all.

God is full of compassion, He’s long-suffering and kind, and He doesn’t hold you up with a measuring stick to any other person or to any other Christian. You are the only you that exists on this planet. And our Lord loves you completely. If you never read the Bible again, that doesn’t change the fact that He created you and He loves you.

My mom has always told me I’ll understand this better when I’m a mom. She has always told me, “I love you because you’re mine. Period the end.”

And it’s period the end with God too.

He doesn’t want you to do more, He wants you to love Him more.

To open up your heart to receive the love that He’s been trying to pour into you from the day you arrived on this earth. To receive the gifts that He whispers and nudges into your life each day. To realize that He has never been more for you. That His love, has always believed in you.

When we really experience the depth of that love, of course we will thank Him, and we will respond to it.

But you see, our culture, they tell us that the value lies in our doing. Just look at Wall Street and you see we are frantic to prove we are worth something. Look at Instagram and the trend that the amount of people who “follow” us show us how important we are.

I think God must looks down at us gently, and say, when is enough enough?

If we keep trying to do enough for God – when does that cycle end? When will we ever feel that our efforts can bring “enough” glory to the creator of the heavens and the earth? That’s the thing. If we try and measure on the “enough” scale, we’ll always come up short.

Because it’s His sufficiency that makes us enough.

Oh, how I’ve missed this, for so many years, and still do, many days:

“We have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Cor. 3:4-5)

I love this! We can trust God because of Christ. We can trust that our sufficiency comes from Him. We can trust that His Spirit does what the law can never do, which is give us life.

So rest your heart today. Come from under what the world says gives us value and take on your identity as a daughter of Christ. We are enough to Him just because we’re HIS. This is who we are.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do on this earth. He has given us gifts and talents and passions and a story, and He’s weaving them all together into His beautiful story of redemption. We have to do some work and soul-searching to foster our gifts and discover this story He’s writing. It’s a journey, and we’re in this together! But let’s be careful not to take on this journey as a burden. I’ve done it.  And that’s when God reminds me, it’s not about me.

It’s not about us, and what our hands are holding at all – the gifts, the time, the platform, the resources. It’s about using anything and everything we have to point to Him.

So when is enough enough? Only when we place what we have into His hands.

Our God can do so much with what you have. Just open your hands and give it to Him. And keep trusting that with Him, it will always be more than enough.