Enough*
"I am nothing, which thing I had never supposed..."
Dear beloved -
I see it in your eyes, your face. The questions.
Does anyone know how much I’m struggling right now?
What would they think if they knew?
How can someone try so hard and feel even worse?
I ache to feel like I’m enough, but all I feel is numb.
I don’t have anything to contribute.
Will this ever go away?
Does He even care?
Can I tell you a story?
In 1984 I was called as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and assigned to serve in the Arizona Tempe mission. Two months after I began serving I received an unexpected call from my mission president, President Lloyd P. George.
He told me that I was going to be a trainer for a new missionary, something that I as a still-new missionary seemed very unprepared for (and this isn’t me trying to be humble here. I truly wasn’t capable of what I was about to be asked to do.)
As if this stunning assignment wasn’t going to be hard enough, President George then explained that the missionary I was going to train had some unique and challenging needs. As a child he had been in a serious car accident and had received a brain injury. One of the consequences of this was that his emotional development had stopped at the point of his injury. This meant he would need additional help and a lot of patience as he learned how to be a missionary. I should also mention that we would both be serving in a new area together. This was going to be…interesting.
What in the world made my mission president think I was the right person for this assignment?
A few days later I arrived at the mission office and met my companion. It was immediately clear that he was different and seemed to lack the basic skills required to fulfill his calling. For the next week we tried to make it work. We would go on visits, attend meetings, and other typical missionary activities. He would quickly lose interest in what we were doing and sometimes would even fall asleep in the middle of a lesson. But there was also a sweetness and childlike faith to him that was very touching. One morning, for example, he made my bed, polished my shoes, and made me breakfast while I was taking a shower. He was so delighted by my surprise.
After he’d been serving with me for a week, President George called to ask how things were going. I shared both the challenges and the good things, indicating that his functionality as a missionary was limited but also that he was trying so hard and was full of love. He then told me that he had been thinking a lot about this young man and had determined that he wasn’t able to fulfill the responsibilities of a missionary and was going to recommend that he return home.
I don’t think I slept well that night. I kept thinking “It’s my fault. If he’d been assigned to a better, more experienced, more competent companion, this wouldn’t be happening. He deserves better. He deserves to stay and I should be the one going home.”
The next day we traveled to the mission home and said goodbye. His eyes were filled with tears. He looked so lost. I felt so lost.
I was assigned a new companion, also a new missionary, and we returned to our area to begin working together. But I couldn’t forget the look in that sweet missionary’s eyes as we said goodbye. He wanted to be there more than anything else in the world, and I was the reason (or so I believed) that he wasn’t able to stay. My heart was shattered.
Several months passed, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of shame and unworthiness I felt. Part of me wanted to feel bad. I deserved to be punished. How was I even allowed to be a missionary? How could God ever trust me again? How could He even love me anymore?
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this process was a painful but necessary part of my spiritual awakening. Oh but it hurt. And it felt like there was no source of relief, no balm that was stronger enough to remove the spreading infection of inadequacy I was racked with.
IT HURTS VERY much to think of you. How could you suffer not only our pains but our sicknesses and infirmities? Did you actually become sick and infirm or merely feel, with your greater imagination, something like what we feel when we are sick and infirm? But could you actually “know according to the flesh,” as you say, if you didn’t literally experience everything with your body? And if you did literally experience our infirmities, did you know our greatest one, sin? Everyone says you didn’t sin, that you were always perfect. But how then could you learn how to help us? And yet if you did sin, if you actually became sick and infirm and unwilling, for a moment, to do what you knew was right, how does that help us? I don’t want you to hurt like this, like I do now, to be ashamed, to hate the detailed, quotidian past. Yet I want you to know the worst of me, the worst of me possible, and still love me, still accept me — like a lovely, terrible drill, tearing me all the way down inside the root, until all the decay and then all the pulp and nerve and all the pain are gone.
Eugene England, Easter Weekend
Fast forward to almost a year later. I’m now helping to train missionaries, traveling with a companion throughout the mission. We’re in Tucson, working in the same area that I began my service in (and staying in the same apartment - I can still remember the address - 534 W. Sahuaro St.) It’s the middle of the night and everyone but me is asleep. I quietly made my way out into the living room and knelt on the cement floor.
I didn’t have the words to say what I felt, but discovered I didn’t need words. What happened in the next few minutes was a turning point, a breakthrough, a moment of transcendent connection. I felt more than heard that God was pleased with me, that I was forgiven, that what had happened with my dear companion was what was supposed to happen.
I was enough.
And now for the asterisk.*
And when they say
That you're not good enough
Well, the answer is you're not…
Paul Simon Quiet
Now, for this cause I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.
Just after my call as a General Authority 16 years ago, in a stake conference where I accompanied President Boyd K. Packer, he said something I have not forgotten. As he addressed the congregation, he said, “I know who I am.” Then after a pause, he added, “I am a nobody.” He then turned to me, sitting on the stand behind him, and said, “And, Brother Andersen, you are a nobody too.” Then he added these words: “If you ever forget it, the Lord will remind you of it instantly, and it won’t be pleasant.”
I could keep going, but here’s what I must remember.
As a child of God, I am of infinite worth. Precious beyond price. Purchased with the blood of the Lamb.
But if I choose not to bind myself to Him, turn my heart without condition to Him, yield my “whole soul” to Him, I am nothing.
So many issues that revolve around the subject of self fade like the dew in the sun as one cultivates faith in the Savior. Without him, nothing else matters. No amount of self-esteem or anything else can adequately fill the void.
(P.S. if you ever want to read/listen to what I think is the best message ever given about self-esteem, Sister Thomas’s talk is the one.)
Am I enough, in and of myself, to become what I was born to become? 100% no.
With Him, through Him, because of Him, my potential and worth become incalculable.
Something to chew on…
A reminder I need each and every day .