The Illusion of Being Enough

People sometimes believe they have enough but deep within there is a sense nothing is enough

By Erin Davis, Op-Ed Contributor Monday, December 11, 2017

Everyone aches for different story as we look the broken world around us. | UNSPLASH/Jakub Dziubak

I've seen it everywhere from Pinterest boards to T-shirts. I'm sure you've seen it, too.

You Are Enough.

Maybe you've heard it this way:

You are enough. You are so enough it's unbelievable how enough you are.

It's a sentiment that feels so good that we want it to be true, but is it? Like every message that comes our way, we need to squeeze this one through the lens of the gospel. Before we do, let's have a quick heart-to-heart about why we all want to be enough so desperately.

The Secret We're All Hiding

Somewhere, deep down in our guts, we all have the sense that we are not enough. We know that we don't really have what it takes to:

Live the sinless life God calls us to.
Impact the world around us in the ways we want to.
Bear the image of God as perfectly as we were designed to.

Every single one of us feels the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Every celebrity. Every president. Every pastor. All of us. We all have a deep and nagging sense that something is wrong with us. And you know what, we're right?

Psalm 51:5 says, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."

We are, at our very core, sinners. We run away from God's best for us. We are not holy as God is holy (1 Peter 1:16); we are broken as the rest of the world is broken. And whether we realize that our sin nature is the problem or not, we are all aware of our flaws and in search of a way to fix them.

Somewhere, deep down, we know . . .

We are not enough to be who everyone wants us to be.
We are not enough to do all that we want to do.
We are not enough to keep our relationships perfectly pain free.
We are not enough to stop the evil in the world.
We are not enough to keep ourselves safe from all that scares us.

We look around at all that is broken around us and within ourselves, and we ache for a different story.

So we click and like and share the idea that we are enough. We wake up and tell ourselves, "You are enough," in the mirror in the hopes that the ache will go away. But it doesn't. Not for long, right?

Flip the Switch

That is a raincloud, but here is the silver lining.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Cor. 12:9).

We cannot fix our insufficiency on our own. We don't have what it takes. But we can use our weaknesses to point to Christ's sufficiency. He truly is everything we need.

For many years, I counseled girls and women battling insecurity by pointing out what I loved about them. It's good to give each other genuine compliments and to encourage each other often, but that method of dealing with insecurity never works for long.

In recent years, I've shifted how I talk about it, because the bottom line is we are deeply broken, and we know it. Insecurity will continue to wreak havoc on our lives unless and until we allow our insufficiently to work like a continual reminder of our sufficient God.

As God's girls, rather than spackling over our failures with pretty sayings in curly scripts, we keep our eyes focused on our desperate need for a Savior. We don't claim, "I'm enough" or "We have what it takes." That contradicts the gospel, which declares "I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior."

Rather than glossing over our inadequacies, we use them like a spotlight to highlight how uniquely perfect Jesus is. We boldly declare:

I am not enough, but Jesus is.

Will you declare it with me?

Taken from Erin Davis' blog, You Are Not Enough. Used with permission from http://www.liesyoungwomenbelieve.com.