A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to not only attend, but to also serve as the MC for my diocese’s Young Adult Retreat. Even though I knew our intentions and knew our goals and knew the themes and the speakers, there was something about experiencing our community go through the weekend that touched my heart in a particular way. I would like to reflect on that theme today.
“You are enough.”
When the team decided on this theme, we considered two meanings for this phrase, which I will explore over the next two weeks.
The first is the one that most folks would recognize. “You are enough,” would mean that we are enough for this world, enough for ourselves, enough for love, enough for God. This is something that many of us, myself included, struggle with regularly. We are constantly trying to do things to make ourselves worthy of the life we desire, both here on Earth and eventually in Heaven.
We do not need to do anything to be enough.
We just need to be ourselves, our true selves, and that is enough.
Of course, knowing oneself is difficult. Believing in oneself is difficult, and it is even more difficult as we live in a community of wonderful people. We see everyone else as competition, as something greater, as something more worthy than ourselves. I don’t believe that this is malicious, but rather it is a sign of our own weakness, of our need for help, of our need for love. After all, we all are in need of love.
My friend in small group pointed out that he recognized that he was further along in the spiritual life than others, but he always just wanted to help them move along with him.
Why, then, would we ever expect anything less out of everyone else around us?
I had the absolute pleasure to witness this truth a couple of weeks ago with my Cell Biology Research students.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to find them,” my newest sophomore whispered as he sat down in front of the microscope. Of my five new sophomores, this student struggled the most with being part of the Notre Dame community. He clung to my instruction, writing down more notes than any student I had before, and he asked me so many questions that even I was unsure about the nuances we never spoke about.
He was so scared that he would not be good enough for our lab.
But then, after he slid around nervously on the coverslip for a moment, he asked his teammate to pull up the image on the computer.
Before I could even speak, the entire team started to praise the boy behind the microscope. My eyes welled up with tears as I listened to them pointing out each and every one of the lysosome membrane tubules, the size of the cell, and the shape of the nucleus. They were not only excited that they had data, but they were praising their teammate for being able to find the cell on his own.
These kids sort of knew one another before they started working together. However, they would not have known by common knowledge just how much their teammate needed their support. They could not possibly have known just how insecure and scared he was just off of the few meetings they had before starting this project.
All they knew was that they needed to love him.
Now this student is excited to go to the microscope. He is excited to watch the cells move, and he is excited to interpret the data. All he needed to reveal his hidden talents was the love and support of his fellow students.
We all have the ability to bring out the talents in others. We all have the ability to love.
This ability to love is God in our hearts. Whether we recognize our goodness or not, we all have God in our heart, and He is all good. It is Him in us that allows us to truly love those around us, even when they are unable to give anything to us.
We do not have to be special to be good enough for God to work.
He does not need us, but instead He wants us.
But there is something more special about this moment than just these kids loving their teammate.
My student acknowledged that he was in need of love, and he accepted it in full.
Being enough is not so much about doing more, having more, wanting more. Rather, it is recognizing our faults, our needs, our imperfections, our weaknesses, and accepting that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t meant to do this all on our own. However, this is not a fatalistic mindset; it is recognizing that there is something else, someone else.
“You are enough” is not just about being enough to live this life.
“You are enough” is a prayer, saying that God is enough.
By His very presence, our whole lives have meaning. Our weaknesses have meaning. Our desires have meaning. Our everything is everything, and our nothing is still something. When we accept that we are in need of love, just as my student did, then we are made open to all of Christ’s love.
And His love, His grace, is sufficient for all things.
But we often cannot see Him, and when we are at the bottom, it is difficult to recognize how He could be enough for us when we do not feel enough for anything other than maybe breathing and going through the motions.
Next week, I will share a particularly special moment from my retreat time to explain how we see Him in the darkness, but for now, I will leave you, Dear Reader, with this:
God loves you
And so do I
He is enough for you
and you are enough for Him.
