Am I enough?
stolen years and eternal love songs.
I wrote this in a coffee shop as part of some personal self-reflection. I hope the truths in this bring strength and freedom to you.
I recommend hitting play on the audio voiceover.
🧡
‘I think I want to go as me today,’ was the thought that casually crossed my mind as I got ready for a business conference I was attending later in the day. It stopped me in my tracks.
It stopped me for a couple of reasons:
I wasn’t aware that I had a habit of showing up to places not as myself.
It awakened me to a depth of confidence that I am pretty sure wasn’t there about 8 months ago.
I smiled and said my thoughts out loud to my dad, who was on babysitting duty. He confirmed with a smile, ‘You should definitely go as yourself today’.
Later on, as I reflected on that moment I started to pay attention to some of the emotions that I was feeling.
The first feeling I felt was a kind of sadness.
How long have I been going to places not as myself? I didn’t even know that I was doing that. When did I start doing that and what caused me to believe that myself as I am was not enough?
The second feeling that I felt was a deep sense of being ‘loved’. Loved by my earthly father and loved by my heavenly Father.
I can only imagine how many years they (my dad and God) have been silently cheering me on to walk in my true identity. I can only imagine how many years of quiet prayer and intercession have been lifted up for me to walk in the fullness of who they knew I was created to be. I can only imagine how many years they (my dad and God) have known that I, as myself, was enough.
I am 33 years old end of this year, which is both a long and short amount of time. The sadness I felt from the revelation I had in the morning was from the realisation that I wasted a lot of my time. I spent so much of it trying to measure up to an imaginary standard for my life and passing off me in favour of something that looked good but wasn’t actually me. But I also feel thankful. Thankful that at 33 I have been made aware of this reality in my life AND that God has been doing His good work in me. Leading me and helping me to become all that He created me to be.
In a world where we are invited to create own identities, define ourselves and take the responsibility in dictating ‘who our true self is’. I am thankful that, as a child of God, I don’t have to shoulder the weight of that responsibility. I am thankful to be the clay in the Potter’s hands. He alone knows my shape, my texture and my purpose. I am thankful that my journey in life is a discovery and journey into my true identity rather than the definition of my identity.
I am not sure about you, but I have only lived once, I am extremely inexperienced at life! I don’t have any prior experience of life, identity or the ways of the heart. And so I am totally happy to throw my hands up and say ‘I need the help of the Great Counsellor’1. He is the Great infinite One, He was here before and will be here after, in Him and through Him all things were made, and He alone knows me through and through2.
When I weigh up His experience versus mine, I will gladly throw myself onto Him any time and every time.
But this way of living is not on that will come to us naturally. You see there is a whisper (well it’s more like a shout) from the enemy’s camp. A rhetoric that is on repeat in our culture. Seeping through our songs, our movies and our literature, and into the church.
It is not a new whisper but an ancient one. Each generation it has been reframed, reworded, packaged and made pretty, but it is the same whisper, the same challenge.
And that whisper is ‘did God really say?’
Did He really say that ‘you are fearfully and wonderfully made’ just as you are? With the body, race, gender, personality that you have?
Did He really say that He has a purpose for you? Like an actual purpose of some consequence or was that actually for the other more qualified people?
Did He really say that He has the best way of living for you? Or is that only to benefit Him?
It is the whisper that keeps us in the chaotic flux of putting our trust in what Jesus says about us and then pulling back and self-defining, self-determining, before realising we have no idea and need God to show us who we are. It is the whisper that keeps Christians from running a consistent race of faith, something that all good athletes know is key to winning any race.
In the context of identity, this whisper causes us to oscillate from confidence in the way God has made us and insecurity that we can never measure up. We are tossed back and forth, back and forth, from rest to strife as this whisper wreaks havoc on our ability to make decisions, form relationships and run with determination the race ahead of us.
This whisper causes us to waste time.
I have been listening to Screwtape Letters over the last few months (I have had to take this bit by bit because that stuff is heavy I am telling you!). One of the overarching themes of the enemy’s strategy, as painted by C.S Lewis, is not so much the ‘big sins’ but the small ways in which the enemy seeks to incrementally separate us from God and what God says about us.
The sadness, I felt that morning was the realisation that I had fell victim of the enemy’s schemes of separating me from the true words of what God says about me and to me.
‘You were just a child, Anna,’ you may be thinking.
And that is true, and that is what makes me mad.
The devil is not fair. He is not looking for a fair fight. He does not wait until our minds are fully formed and able to confidently decipher all the voices coming at us. He doesn’t wait until we have grown to maturity in the faith before he hits. He is looking to get us whilst we are young and weak and unable to defend ourselves.
And that makes me mad.
But what he always underestimates is the love that God has for His children. He underestimates the lengths that God goes to redeem His beloved and bring us into the fullness of the life He has planned for us.
As the enemy whispers ‘Did God really say?’, your heavenly Father sings a never-ending song of love over you. Throughout my 33 years of wrestling, His song has always been consistent and always true.
‘You are loved, you are enough, you are mine.’3
And so when those moments of revelation come where you poke your head through the bathroom door and say ‘I think I want to go as me today’, you won’t find yourself face to face with an uncertain opinion that needs convincing. But you will find yourself joining in with the song that is already being sung over you.
‘You are loved, you are enough, you are mine.’
One day Satan and his minions, all his lies, whispers and falsehoods will be judged and thrown into the abyss, and what a marvellous day that will be. But until that day let us wage war against the chaotic rhetoric of doubt and be a people who stand confident not in our own definition of self, but in the eternal One’s opinion of us.
‘I am loved, I am enough, I am His.’
Culture’s song of self-definition is sweet on the ears but deadly on the soul. Don’t be lulled to sleep by it. It will only end in a dead end of deception and stolen destiny.
There is only One person who has the authority and therefore the right to define you. He is the one who made you, the one who knew before you were knit together in your mother’s womb. He alone has the authority to define you. And His definition of you will always exceed any human definition of you… even your definition of you.
Only the Maker can define the art. Only He can accurately and lovingly show you who you really are. Trust Him to speak.
I am cheering for you, willing you and praying for you to walk the narrow road and run all the way to the end. And as always I am thankful that you are here,
Until next time,
Love Anna x
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Some thoughts from this week:
Verses to ponder through - Zeph 3:16-18, Jer 31:3,