To Be or Not to Be

“What if you’re enough, just the way you are?”

The subject line of the email startled me. Haunted me for days, if I’m honest.

“What if you’re enough, just the way you are?”

My gut reaction? “What? Of course I’m not enough. And anyway, isn’t that kind of a sacrilegious question?”

Because I’m supposed to be growing in my Christian faith. Doing great exploits for God. Becoming more like Christ. Displaying more of the fruit of the Spirit. Doing. Seeking. Pressing toward the mark and all that. Right?

Hmm. I ran it past my husband. “Honey,” he said, “God wants you to focus on being more than on doing.”

Really?

The next day, I read a book called the Language of Promise, by Graham Cooke.

Okay. Deep breath.

I know all of this in my head. Theoretically. So why is it so easy to compare myself to others who are doing “great things” for God and His kingdom and see myself as woefully lacking in production?

Somehow I have fallen into the mindset of the Galatians that Paul had to refute: “O foolish Galatians? Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:1-5)

Ouch.

I’m still mulling and praying through the next few days when I pick up Be Anxious for Nothing² by Joyce Meyer. I’ve read it before…it’s nothing new. But this time, I pull out my highlighter when I read this: “Sometimes if we don’t sense that the Spirit of God is leading us to do something, we lead ourselves to do it. After all, we reason, we ought to be doing something. We seem to have the mistaken idea if we are not actively doing something, God can’t work. We forget we are to cast on Him our care, not our responsibility. It is our responsibility to trust, to pray without worry, and to avoid words of the flesh. When we go beyond that responsibility and start to pray and worry, we cancel out our prayers. They become nothing more than a work of the flesh, an attempt to change things by our own energy and effort.”

Apparently this is something God wants me (and maybe you?) to learn.

“The Father doesn’t want you to approach spirituality from the mindset of achieving. There are no grades in the Kingdom, nothing to strive for that will change the way He sees you. The Father loves you exactly the same on your very best day and on the worst.”³

¹ Cooke, Graham. The Language of Promise. Brilliant Book House

²Meyer, Joyce. Be Anxious for Nothing. Harrison House, 1998.

³Cooke, Graham. The Language of Promise. Brilliant Book House