Actually, You Are Not Enough

hoto by Austin Kehmeier on Unsplash

I began noticing yard signs popping up where I lived some years ago, and I got curious. They were blazoned not with political slogans or candidate names, but positive messages. Driving along, navigating rude drivers and red lights, I’d read, “You matter.”

“Don’t give up.”

“You are not alone.”

I soon learned that a mental health agency in town conceived the campaign to support people in a tough spot. We all face gloomy days, and who knows? maybe a drive-by reminder might help.

But one sign left me with mixed feelings: “You are enough.”

Mixed feelings because, on the one hand, you and I have strengths we often overlook. Maybe we look back and see how we braved a tough situation with poise and courage, or came out a better person. Perhaps the same determination helps us now, in the current crisis.

So getting encouragement to draw on such resources? Sure! And to counter voices that well up from within, accusing us of being inadequate, even unlovable? That’s a message to carry home with you. Especially when a person we know, out of woundedness or narcissism, can make us feel undervalued.

But are we ourselves “enough”? That’s what catches me up.

Is there really some inner well of confidence we just need to tap into? Do we practice the adult version of putting a gold star on our own homework? And can we pep-talk ourselves through our hassles and griefs because we are pretty darn good—just as we are? Aren’t we already, well, amazing? I think of Bob Wiley, played by Bill Murray in What about Bob? navigating a busy street, chanting to his neurotic, rattled self, “I feel good. I feel great. I feel wonderful.”

I’m not optimistic.

Not for myself, not for you, readers. More earnestly coaching myself won’t work if the real sources come from elsewhere.

Simply looking inward can mean, after all, that I fall into ruminating, speculating, thinking the worst. I doubt if you are much better at this than I am. Do we really want to face challenges from life and work limiting ourselves to our own private store of “enough”?

If nothing else, I find what I need to thrive in and through others. We don’t “do” ourselves by ourselves. We can’t. Despite the pressures to be self-sufficient and master our fate, we will flounder without people who love us and support us. Why even hint that we have what we need inside our own cramped little souls?

And there’s another way the “enoughness” runs aground. We need divine help from a more cosmic supply side. God has made me, sure, and gives all of us dignity and agency. God plants abilities and creativity in each human soul. Granted.

But I’m not sold that we just need to sit with self-affirmation mantras or listen to a “Your Best Life Now” talk. That approach won’t satisfy if the problem runs deeper. It won’t solve the issue we face. Not if we have a bad case of falling short of what God intended for us. Not if we are by disposition and constitution tripped up and broken in places. Chronically prone to missing the mark. There’s only so much inside to tap into without this larger Presence.

We need, rather, the sense of worth that comes from knowing that we are made by God and loved by God. I like what someone once said, looking back on a hard situation: “I had a strength on the inside that came from the outside.” And I find it true for me: The ability to hang in there comes from beyond me. I turn not so much inward but upward.

Kate Bowler, podcaster and author, recounts having surgery after a “terrible diagnosis” of Stage IV colon cancer. “Nothing in my life was going to be okay,” she recalls.” Rosy projections and attempts at reassurance from others didn’t help, nor did positive “affirmations,” not when, as she says, “I couldn’t even imagine next week.”

Then, through the visits of family and colleagues and dear friends, she remembers, “I had this overwhelming feeling of being really … cherished. People’s faces [were] shining love on me. … I felt loved … spiritually loved by God.” Everything seemed hard, even absurd, she said. But, she says, “I felt beloved.” And that awareness brought home from others and the big Other carried her through the day. And the next.

There’s something humbling about that. She got help from beyond. One of the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer begins, “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” The very way we address God in that prayer gets us started in the right place: Almighty God. God as All-able. God as Enough. And then, we admit it: not just to God, who already knows it, but to ourselves: We don’t have, brimming and bubbling up from within, everything we need. We see how far from enough we are in ourselves. We don’t have it figured out yet.

Musician and writer Strahan Coleman includes a blessing in one of his books that points us forward. “May you count your weakness,” he writes, “as God’s strength.” May you, he says, see “your fear as an opportunity for placing faith in more trustworthy, able hands, giving up your littleness for the greatness of your Father.” Prayer, vol. 03, page 79.

I made a small discovery while searching my computer for “You are enough.” I found the yard sign story I expected—but then the three-word phrase You are enough popped up in a file long-forgotten. The phrase this time came from Julian of Norwich, from a very different setting.

She lived through the monumental social tumult of the fourteenth century: A plague wiped out as much as half of the population of some towns. There was famine, war, and church conflict in her England. Yet she focused not on despair but on how God delights when a simple soul comes to him humbly, the way it is a “pleasure” to God “that a simple soul should come to him in a bare, plain and homely way.” There’s the humility I mentioned.

And then she exults at where it leads: the natural yearning of the soul, she continues, is led by the Holy Spirit toward the divine. We find in ourselves an expectant voice, a hopeful plea, praying this way: “God, of your goodness, give me yourself; for you are enough for me.” God is enough, she realized, even when we are not, and cannot be.

Facing something you dread? Wondering if you have what it takes? Should you say, “You are enough?” When all heck is breaking loose, pray this prayer—Julian’s prayer:

“God, give me yourself, for you are enough.”

Said to God, what could be truer?