Not good enough

As a new graduate student, I’ve spent a lot of my first semester hiding in the spacious Kathryn A. Martin library at UMD. It’s one of my favorite places to decode French art song texts and bleed out research papers (if you can have a favorite place for that sort of thing). They let you eat chips at this library, and headphones mean you can fine-tune the dull art of Googling Sergei Prokofiev while jamming out to…uh, well, probably more Prokofiev for that upcoming jury you should be practicing for.  Mercifully, people rarely look at you unless you talk to yourself or sneeze or break your 6-second limit for discreetly removing contact lenses.

However, I people watch more than I’d like. I can’t help it—people are so fascinating. Everyone walks around with a life story zipped up in their backpack, and sadly, those stories often go untold. The other day, however, I heard a story that wasn’t meant for me. While standing at a printing station, my eyes took in an upperclassmen girl wrapped up in a pink hoodie, blue eyes glassy from the reflection of the computer screen directly across from me. The only reason I noticed was because of the guy in a blue-striped dress shirt next to her audibly pestering her with questions.

“So she hasn’t talked to you?” he prodded. “I just need to know. I need to know why.” He was obviously trying to process why someone, a friend of this pink-hoodie-girl, had broken off a relationship with him. But pink-hoodie was disinterested. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked. She kept typing and mouthed a monotone, “I don’t know. Things happen. She said she talked to you.” Annoyed after another question, she sighed, “Maybe she just doesn’t have feelings for you anymore. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be with you.”  Several minutes later, the girl swiped her U-Card and grabbed her printed documents to leave. The guy, seemingly oblivious to her annoyance, said “Thank you for talking and trying to help,” to which she gave a cool “Yep.” He followed her out of the library like a lost puppy, and my heart tagged along like an invisible Olaf.

I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know what pink-hoodie was going through, or why she had so little to say to the hurting guy, or what he did. What I saw was a broken, lost soul, trying to reconcile his identity and getting no answers. I saw someone asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

I saw myself.

This past year, words that others have thrown at me have stuck like tattoos that were supposed to be temporary but wouldn’t wash off.

“You’ll always be a loser.”

“You’re getting in the way of what I want.”

“You’re a burden.” 

“You have a miserably mediocre life.”

They’re like unwanted marks on a clean paper—when I try to erase them, my faulty mental eraser only smudges more.

Oh, I know they shouldn’t matter because they’re only words…but they do, because words come from people. Unkind words hurt most when they’re from people whom we trust, whom we think love or need us—basically people we gauge our worth from. They hurt when they’re from people who know us intimately and then can’t deal with it. They say in essence, “You’re not good enough.”

While we can all think more highly of ourselves than we should, it’s not hard to think “I’m not good enough” in this world, is it? Just ask any college student after they fail a test or an athlete after they fail their team. Ask a girl as she watches the guy she cared about holding hands with another girl. Ask that socially awkward introvert who gets forgotten on the invite list. To stay ahead in a competitive society, you can’t just be “okay.” You have to excel. You have to have something special to offer.

Library guy, if I could’ve talked to you, this is what I would’ve said:
I’m sorry for what happened to you, no matter whose fault it was. We’re all broken, and rarely are any of us truly innocent in the messiness of relationships. The fact is that hurt people are good at hurting other people. Whatever happened isn’t because you aren’t good enough. Because really, are any of us “good enough”?

The God who created us sees us at our very hearts, and He says, “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God….There is none who does good...all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Rom. 3:10-11, 12b, 23) Really encouraging, right?

Hear me out.

We spend most of our lives trying to build little support systems to lean on. It’s normal human behavior, but the problem comes in when these little “posts” of financial security, relationships, achievements, health, and other things become God replacements—idols. The problem is, we think we can control them, but they actually control us. They form our identity and thus dictate our happiness or sadness. They’re what we run to save us when we’re down. But surprise—because they’re counterfeits of the real God we were created to enjoy, they never satisfy. Like drinking salt water, they only leave you thirstier than you were before.

So what if God, who wants us to actually find fulfillment in Him and who we were created to be, decides to allow our posts to topple because He loves us? When we get the wind knocked out of us and sit in the dust of our crumbling idols, we can shake our fists: “Why, God? I needed that stuff!” But as the dust clears and we choose to look up, hopefully over time we finally see the truth that we’ve always needed more than anything: God.

He was always there. He has always seen our worst sides, our failures, our selfishness, and He has always loved us anyway. We are the foolish ones who think that somehow we are convincing God to love us more when we pray more or keep the rules or paste on a happy face all the time.

Yes, on a human level, our value usually rises and falls to each other based on what we can do for each other or how we make someone feel. Are we funny? Are we pretty? Do we bump someone up on the social ladder?

Guess what?! God doesn’t love that way. Here’s how we know: “For rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person perhaps someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:7-8) Jesus was perfectly innocent, yet willingly took our sin penalty for us so we could have a restored relationship with God. He traded our guilt and shame for his righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21). We must only take that by faith (Rom. 4:5).

This summer, I was struggling through one of my intermittent bouts of depression. This season had been triggered by a painful situation in my life. I felt like someone had plunged a knife in my chest and it had never quite come out. Life was too tiring. In struggling to forgive, I saw the frailty and ugliness of my heart like never before. It was during this hard time that I read a book from a friend that posed a most startling question: “Do you really believe God loves you?”

Our natural reaction to that question is “Duh. All the ‘Smile, Jesus loves you’ bumper stickers can tell you that. Of course He does.” But when I was honest with myself, the floodgates opened. No, I didn’t really want to believe that God truly loved me—me personally, even at my worst, when I could do nothing for him. It was too hard to embrace. Besides, if God loved me, why was there so much pain in my heart?

It was hard to come to grips with, but the root of many human problems is that we do not truly believe we are loved by God. We can't give someone else something we don't have. We go around trying to beg scraps of love from other people and convince them of our worth, when God already cares about us infinitely more than anyone ever could. Or we bring God down to our level and assume He will treat us just as unfaithfully as others do, when He has promised to never leave.

Yet what if we really believed God loves us unconditionally and through Christ, sees us as righteous? Just as hurt people hurt others, so do healed people help heal others. Since my little epiphany this summer, I have had to constantly remind myself that the only way I will know God loves me is not because of what He’s giving me (or not giving me) or how I feel, but because of what He did for me at the cross. As Tim Keller writes:

There may be no greater inner agony than the loss of a relationship we desperately want. If a mild acquaintance turns on you, condemns and criticizes you, and says she never wants to see you again, it is painful. If someone you're dating does the same thing, it is qualitatively more painful. But if your spouse does this to you, or if one of your parents does this to you when you're still a child, the psychological damage is infinitely worse. We cannot fathom, however, what it would be like to lose...the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity....Jesus bore, as the substitution in our place, the endless exclusion from God that the human race has merited.

May I not forget that Jesus knows and understands my pain, even in my darkest moments. He was willing to experience ultimate separation from God so I wouldn't have to.

Jesus told his disciples before he died, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” (John 15:4) How do you abide, or stay connected, in that love? By believing it! If you can’t believe it, go back to His words. Go over them and over them until they replace the lies of others and the lies of your own heart. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18a)

One day, library guy, I pray you realize that while you might not be “good enough,” God loves you anyway, and that is enough.