Are you enough?

'You are enough'

What does it even mean?

It conveys the idea that you can do anything. 

But anyone who has tried ballet realises that you cannot do anything. You cannot do a pirouette after one lesson. It takes years. And then you realise that you have the wrong foot shape for pointe, or you injure yourself. Or you become a professional ballerina, and then you grow old (I grow old.../I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled)

It conveys the idea that you can create your own happiness, and it will sustain you and you need never hurt or feel sad again.

But even if you are a happy person things happen and people die and hearts break and planes crash, and you realise this world is full of sadness, and sometimes it flies into you like a speck of dust into your eye and the only way to get it out is cry, no matter how many times you've told yourself 'I'm happy'.

It conveys the idea that you can trust yourself.

But when you are angry with that person and in the heat of the moment you say 'I wish you'd never been born' you realise you can't, and that somewhere deep inside you is a monster that leaps out and scratches the hearts of the people you love and leaves deep scars that are hard to heal. 

The thing is, we are all too imperfect to be enough. We are certainly incredible beings, with complex bodies and vast reservoirs of love and creative ideas and spontaneous dance parties, but we are also flawed in so many shattered ways.

And so I disagree with the concept of 'enough-ness'. We should appreciate and love ourselves without feeling the need to be 'enough' for ourselves, because we never will be. We love our friends and family in their broken, flawed states, and don't expect them to be 'enough' so we shouldn't expect ourselves to be either.

That is not to say that we should glorify our weakness. Our weakness is just that, weakness - it leads to bad thoughts, unkind words, selfish actions. To glorify it would lead to another sort of 'I am enough' mentality. The sort that settles for less than we have the vision for, and leads to temporary pleasure and cheap thrills which ultimately leaves us more thirsty and dissatisfied than before.

We are then stuck in this tension between not being enough, and having the vision for so much more - wanting enough-ness, wanting complete fulfillment, wanting life in all it's riches and glittering joy. If we cannot find the answer to that in our world, and if we cannot find the answer to that in ourselves or the people around us who are refracted versions of our flawed self, then the logical conclusion is that the answer is elsewhere, and in a perfect being.

Jesus said, "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

Jesus said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness."

"Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power." Colossians 2:8-10