Am I Not Enough? Trusting God, Not My Own Strength

Waiting, the hardest activity we undertake during our short time on earth, exposes the holes in our otherwise ‘strong faith.’ For an activity we practice almost every day the lesson never seems to sink all the way in. We wait in line at the drive-thru for our daily caffeine hit or for a quick dinner after a long day. We wait in small rooms lined with semi-comfortable chairs to see the doctor or specialist. We wait for packages to arrive in the mail after ordering online. We wait for test results from a professional licensing exam, for the two faint pink lines, or from the oncologist.

“Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
– Benjamin Franklin

Our friend, Ben, is, of course, correct in his assessment of life, but I would add to his list of certainties the presence of waiting in our lives. Whether it’s a short 15-minute wait, a full week of waiting, or years spent waiting, we have no illusions about its periodic occurrence, however infrequent that might be for you. What is uncertain about waiting is how we will react to it when it happens to us.

Am I the woman who knows and fully believes God’s plans are better than I could imagine and higher than I could dare to dream? Am I the woman who tires of waiting for things in her life to finally begin moving, instead taking action on her own? Or am I the woman who’s been waiting for years for her lucky break with no end in sight? I know which woman I am and which woman I wish to be in the middle of endless waiting.

Unemployed and Waiting

My story with unemployment is like so many others these days, not uncommon and a recurring theme in so many people’s lives. Waiting a year or two to find a job relative to your degree after graduating is widely accepted as the average time, with many graduates taking jobs not requiring a degree in the interim. Depending on your area of study and the specific jobs you’re searching for, the market for employment is competitive and standards are at an all-time high.

When I say I applied to thousands of jobs after graduate school, I am not exaggerating. I combed through LinkedIn and Indeed posts until the jobs were simply repeats. I knew each of them by heart. Every morning as I sat at my computer to sift through the jobs yet again, I prayed for God to open doors. Of course, I wanted what God wanted for me, but a small part of me had other motivations for finding a job.

During my then morning routine of checking Facebook and Instagram to see what happened overnight, friends from college scrolled past boasting of the new job they accepted. In the wake of congratulations was a steadily spreading worthlessness within me. I prayed for God move in my life, to take me where He wanted me to go, and to, please, make it somewhere amazing. But I wasn’t prepared for what He had in mind.

I know I’m not the first person to seek their worth and identity from a job title or specific company, rather than from Jesus. Do we set out on our journey looking to replace God with a job as the center of our life? I don’t think we do this consciously. A swirling mixture of expectations from our family and friends and ourselves, what the world says will make us happy, and the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality, combine creating a Disappointment Cocktail we routinely administer.

What did you expect?

We are not only born into this world with expectation, but into expectation. As infants we’re born into the expectations of our parents on how we will act, cry, sleep, and eat. Those parental expectations change and mature as we grow and age and mature. But their expectations of us come on the back of so much more than simply their idea of how we will be and live in and out of their home.

From the moment of existence, your mother and father were pregnant with expectation, as well as you. Over the months of waiting as you formed in the secret place, so too did their expectations, at once a picture of the lives of their parents and grandparents, how hard they worked for their children, the standards to which your parents were held growing up. In the briefest flash and long moments of consideration what your parents expect of you, what I expect of my son and I how I picture his life take root.

I explain expectations this way because they are more than simply a list of rules or a path to follow throughout life. The expectations our family holds over us is a hopeful vision, informing our own expectations.

What will make you happy?

The second component of our Disappointment Cocktail is believing what the world says brings happiness. When I pictured my future self working, I didn’t work somewhere for the simple act of working. My vision was full of joy and fulfillment. I wanted to work where I used my talent, where I made a difference in the lives of others, and where I felt joy in my work, not just somewhere to get a paycheck.

I know, I know. How naïve can a person be? While I still believe in making a difference wherever I work and finding ways to use my creativity, not everyone loves their job, and that’s okay. Not all jobs will satiate your need for fulfillment like others will, and not all seasons last forever. What’s more, the source of my happiness cannot be found in anything of this world. It can only be found in the grace of God and the knowledge that Jesus died for me. If we keep searching for fulfilling happiness in the things of the world, we will be chronically unhappy.

Did working harder get you where you wanted to go?

Good work ethic, shouldering the responsibility placed on you, and doing all things for God’s glorification are straight from the bible. God intends for us to work in whichever way that might be, but He never wants us working from only our own limited strength. After a while of applying to jobs, it became clear God’s path for me was to not work for a time. Confusion pulsed through my veins when, at last, I heard an answer to my prayers for work.

“Wait. Trust me.”

Like the Israelites complaints so many years before me, I lifted mine up to God asking, Why have you led me through all we’ve walked through together, only to leave me stranded now? Why will you not move in the life of your servant? I don’t know all the answers and it’s likely I never will because God is still the mysterious God of the Old Testament, just as He is the loving and compassionate God of the New Testament. Again and again, I prayed for a job, and again and again I heard the same response.

“Wait. Trust me.”

Am I not enough for you?

I’ve attended a weekly virtual bible study since early on in the pandemic. During a recent meeting I retold the story I’m telling you now, one which deeply informs and reshaped my testimony of God’s faithfulness to His daughters. I explained graduating with a master’s degree, my hopeless job search, and the answer I heard to my prayers over and over again. Before the pandemic and our upended lives, I would have ended my story there because there was no more to tell. I was still waiting for the ending to come.

In the hush, I take creaky tentative steps down the hall, hoping the noise I made in the bathroom wasn’t enough to wake a sleeping baby; under a warm blanket with pages spread open before me, squinting to read the small words as the cold outside air seeps through the edges of the large window, I find Him. He waits for me here each morning, a standing date to hold me as I hold others throughout the day.

At some point in the last year, I’m not sure when or how it happened, God confronted me about my continued prayers for something He has chosen to withhold. With compassion for my frustration and gentleness in His discipline, I heard God ask in His powerful quiet way, “Is a job what it will take to convince you of your worth to me? Do you not trust that I have other plans for you? Am I not enough for you?”

Feeling as I imagine the Israelites did after yet another rebuke from God in the desert, my heart opened to receive what God offered. Maybe our waiting seasons are working seasons after all. Perhaps while I whined and complained about how I wanted to be like everyone else, He prepared me to be set apart. He prepared the soil of my unwilling heart for a harvest He knew was coming.

The Israelites learned a hard lesson waiting and wandering the desert for 40 years, most of whom would never see the Promised Land because of their continued disobedience and unbelief. We like to think of ourselves as so much better, more righteous than the Israelites of old, but how far have we really come? How much have we truly learned from their experience?