Are you good enough? I recently attended a celebration of life for a young mother who died never feeling like she was good enough. I read about a local high school student who took the word of some classmates that he wasn't good enough - and their suggestion that he should take his own life. A friend posted that she felt like she was a failure as a parent. No matter what she did, it wasn't good enough.
So, it's a serious question. A life or death question sometimes.
How do we figure out if we're good enough? From what do we derive our self-worth. And how do we help the people we love to discover that they are not merely good enough, but immeasurably valuable.
The world's answer is to insist that we are all special and to give kids trophies just for showing up. Humanism tells us there is no right or wrong, only actions with different consequences. Judging others is the only sin. As the song says, "We are all innocent."
It's a utopian ideal that just doesn't hold much water in the real world. To begin with, almost no one lives to adulthood without being the victim of some action that seems decidedly wrong. You develop the logic tools to realize that judging people for judging people is still judging people. You do something that keeps you up nights with guilt. Eventually all but the most air headed know that we are not all innocent.
There must be a bar, then. Does being human give us a value? Not according to popular culture. In the womb, anyway, your moral status depends entirely on whether other people want you. You don't deserve to be wanted because you are human. You are human only if someone wants you. By this standard, the dead high school student did the right thing. That cannot be okay.
Public opinion also says that Christianity holds us to a much higher standard. To quote one of my favorite un-Christmas movies, the point of Christmas is that either you're good and you get presents or you're bad and you go to hell.
Public opinion is wrong. In so many ways. To start with, it makes no distinction between moral failure and the natural mistakes of life and learning. We beat ourselves up for not making the shot as much as we do for having stolen the neighbor's ball. We feel more stress over being late than cursing the driver in front of us who didn't run the light. Jesus, in his perfection, did not sin, but he did fall when learning to walk. He did not walk into his father's workshop and build a full dining set on his first try. He probably missed the nail the first time he swung the hammer.
That's one of the many things that makes Christianity unique of all the world's religions. Our Lord knows what it feels like to not live up to people's expectations. He knows what it was like to try something and fail. Not just in an abstract, omniscient way, but in an experienced personal way. Nowhere in the Bible does it say God's people will never trip on their own two feet or will win at every contest. God's concept of perfection is very different from our own.
Also unique to the Christian faith is the understanding that nobody is perfect apart from God. Not the preacher, or the supermom, or the superstar. None. Nobody is good enough to enter heaven. Everyone is bad enough to deserve hell. Without God's mercy and grace we all condemn ourselves every single day.
Faced with this reality, God didn't draw an arbitrary line and say, "if they are right 70% of the time, I'll let them in anyway." He doesn't accept the top 15%. Instead He personally paid the price of admission for all of us. It was a steep price.
And all He asks in return is that we trust Him to make good on the promise. Now, that is both as simple as it sounds and too complex to put into a single blog.
The main thing is, He paid your price. He looked at you, with all your failings and said, "I will die for this person." You are enough for God to humble himself to be born in a barn, suffer through a human life, endure betrayal and mocking and finally die in a slow, painful fashion for you.
He didn't do it for some other, nicer, more productive people who always keep their cool, show up on time, and only feed their kids organic. He did it for you. He planned for you. There are lots of good reasons for you to try harder and do better. But as you are, right now, you are enough for Christ to die for.
That's good enough for me.
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