I am tired of trying so hard to be … enough.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was little, I knew I was enough. I felt it all the way from my crooked front tooth down to my curly pinky toes. My mom told me I was enough, and I believed her. My dad told me I was enough, and I believed him. My Sunday School teacher told me God said I was enough, and I believed her too.
But somewhere along the way, I stopped believing everyone who poured into me that I was special, that I was beautiful, that I could do anything I set my mind to. I looked around me and everywhere I looked I saw prettier, smarter, friendlier, thinner, better. I saw more athletic, more talented, more popular, more attractive, more, more, more, and still more, until I felt like a tiny little person in a big huge world full of so much more than I could ever be.
And then I started working hard to not be so much less in this world of so much more. I weighed and measured and compared and critiqued until I inched a little closer, but then someone would come along who was even more and raised the bar still higher and there I would be, right back where I started, feeling like one of those chocolate truffles with the indistinguishable filling that no one is brave enough to try.
I just want to be enough. When my kids look perfect and people ask me how I do it, and when my kids forget their manners and I wonder where I went wrong. When love is a dozen roses and dinners by candlelight, and when it’s a box of Kleenex and a pint of ice cream eaten alone. When my jeans finally fit … and again when they don’t. When my house is charming, and when it is embarrassing. When I’m the captain of my ship, and when my ship is falling apart.
I just want to be enough.
Once in a while in the still of the night when the world is at rest and my thoughts can be heard, there is a whisper in my heart that tells me what I’ve known for so long but forget so often, and it’s like a lullaby written solely for me in precisely the right key,
I am enough.
And I say this to you because maybe you’re like me, and you felt this once upon a childhood, but somewhere along the way your enoughness was buried beneath the weight of your coworkers’ cutthroat clamor for the top, or your friends’ flashy Facebook lives with the painful truths carefully tucked away, or those judgmental whispers you may not have heard but that seeped in and chilled your bones all the same.
And if, like me, that is you, and you are trying to listen but there is just too much noise and you can’t hear yourself think and you don’t know if you can find your way, I beg you to sit for a moment and hear the still, small voice that has been calling you since he created you and placed you on this earth for the reasons only you can hear.
If you weren’t enough, he wouldn’t have come for you and he surely wouldn’t have died for you, so you can rest assured it is true, truer than your mother or your father or any Sunday School teacher ever could have explained to you. It is true in a way only you can fully know when you are fully still and you can fully hear, no you can fully feel, the voice in your bones that drives out the chill that has left you so cold for so long.
Lean in close so you don’t miss a word because it’s the truth you can’t leave behind like it really isn’t true, like it simply doesn’t matter, like it’s true for some but not so true for you. It’s the truth you’ve been carrying in your heart but the road has been so long and lonely it’s made you forget what your heart has been crying all along.
Just stop all your clamoring and your critiquing, all your climbing and comparing, stop it all just long enough to hear it loud and clear, whispered gently in your listening ear …
My child,
you are
enough.
Shaking My Dust 
You are enough. ❤️
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