“For I know well the plans I have in mind for you.”
Jeremiah 29:11
My mom is convinced my ten-year-old brother has a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. Ever since he was about six or seven years old, he’s talked about how when he grows up, he’s going to live in the woods by himself and pray for the conversion of the world. A few months ago, he was talking about this to my mom, and she posed this question to him: “Adam, have you ever thought God might be calling you to be a priest or a religious?”
“Oh, no,” was his quick response. “I could never do that.”
“Why not?” my mom asked, curious as to why he would say such a thing.
He looked straight at my mom with his beautiful brown eyes that could melt any woman’s heart and said, “I’m not good enough to do that.”
My mom told one of our parish priests about this after daily Mass a few days later, and he nodded in understanding as she told him what my brother had said. “Ah, yes,” he said. “That’s exactly how I felt when I was a kid about becoming a priest.”
While you might be tempted to say, “Aww, how precious!” in response to this story and say a quick prayer for his possible vocation, as I did when my mom first told me, there is a deeper, weighty truth in it that I only recently realized. The other night, I dreamed that I had found my future husband, but I was drawing away from him because I did not feel good enough for him or for the sacrament of marriage. I woke up right after this to find sunlight streaming through my window and that alas, I had not found my future husband after all; but as I was about to roll over and doze off for just a bit longer, the story of my brother came to mind and several emotional puzzle pieces fell into place. If my brother feels he is not good enough for the priesthood, and my parish priest felt this way before he started to actively discern this calling, then of course it would make sense that I feel - and have felt for a long time now - that I am not good enough for my future husband, and for the sacrament of marriage.
Perhaps this is why it so often is difficult for any human to feel good enough. How easy it is to see Satan behind this! He takes our faults and our failings, our quirks and our circumstances, our insecurities and our weaknesses and tells us that because of x, y, or z we are not good enough. He’s smart, too. He starts with the little things: the school assignments, the games at recess; and he whispers inside our hearts that we aren’t good enough when we don’t do well on the test, or we get picked last for dodgeball. He whispers to us that we aren’t good enough when the person you called your best friend betrays you in an act of middle school foolishness, or the boy you’ve been crushing on for months asks out someone who’s more popular than you. He finds these smaller things and he does everything in his power to make us feel that we aren’t good enough so that when it comes to our vocations in life, we’ve been so well-trained to automatically go to our faults, our circumstances, and our insecurities and say, “I can’t do that. I’m not good enough.”
Lies, absolute lies. The God who thought of you before He willed the universe into existence does not create anything that is not good enough. He loves each and every one of us regardless of the imperfections, faults, and circumstances caused by Original Sin. When He created you and I, He also created a beautiful plan for each of our lives, and He gives us exactly what we need to fulfill His plans. It is undoubtedly easy to feel as though we are insufficient, but God uses our weaknesses to make Himself known, both to us and to those around us; and if we but give Him the tiniest window of opportunity in our hearts, He will turn those weaknesses into strengths. God is the God of oddities and quirks, just as He is the God of the stars and the sky. Every talent, every quirk, every trait that He has given you, He has done so that the world may see Him in a unique way.
God has given you all you need to fulfill His plans for you. Will you turn to Him and let Him assure you that you are, indeed, good enough?
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