The Spiritual Trap of "Enough"
These past two summers, I worked with the program Totus Tuus
within the Archdiocese of Omaha. This
gave me the opportunity to go to eleven different parishes leading week-long youth
catechetical programs, and these experiences provided me with so much grace! However, one particular lesson stands out as
a foundation for everything I received: the realization of the “spiritual trap
of ‘enough.’”
One night during my very first week of teaching, I was praying night prayer with my fellow teachers and was listening to repeated desolating thoughts in my mind: “Am I teaching enough? Am I being with the kids enough? Am I getting to know my teammates enough? Am I loving enough?” In a sense, I was discouraged and wondering what more could I do, but then I realized the common bond between all of these statements: enough. God showed me right there that this was a trap from the Enemy – from Satan’s voice and from my own false self – and I saw that this wasn’t what He wanted me to think.
Consider this: whenever we use the word “enough,” we imply that there is a goal we are striving to reach. If we work hard at it, then we will eventually get there. However, if we don’t get there, then we become failures, and nobody likes to fail! I found myself applying this to doing God’s will: if I pray, work, and love enough, then I’ll be able to do God’s will, but if I don’t do enough, then I can never carry out His will, leading to His rejection of me.
Yet this entire mindset is completely backwards from what God wants! My vocation director taught me a beautiful summarizing statement: Relationship, Identify, Mission (RIM, just like those big fancy rims on cool cars – you’ll never forget this image now!). Essentially, what this tells us is that everything we do has to come from our relationship with God, for it is He who defines who we are. We are His beloved sons and daughters from the fact that He created us and that we are baptized into His family, the Church. Only from this identity does our mission flow – His grace of relationship sustains us in our journey toward love.
However, whenever our thoughts revolve around “enough,” we flip this entire mindset around. “If I don’t do enough (mission), I won’t really be a child of God (identity), leading to my relationship with Him being broken.” In this model, we’re trying to work toward relationship, and it’s no wonder how we often feel like failures because of our finitude and attraction to sin! So much of this broken framework comes from our society: we are taught to work hard to success and to gain excellence, and if we fail, then we have no hope. With God, all of this is different though, for all is based on infinite love.
This simple shift in mentality has brought tremendous grace into my spiritual life and the lives of the friends I’ve shared this with, and I’m sure that several posts in the future will continue on this topic. As we begin to recognize how often our minds say “enough,” may we remember the one circumstance in which the word is tremendously helpful: “Your grace is enough for me!” (2 Cor 12:9).
One night during my very first week of teaching, I was praying night prayer with my fellow teachers and was listening to repeated desolating thoughts in my mind: “Am I teaching enough? Am I being with the kids enough? Am I getting to know my teammates enough? Am I loving enough?” In a sense, I was discouraged and wondering what more could I do, but then I realized the common bond between all of these statements: enough. God showed me right there that this was a trap from the Enemy – from Satan’s voice and from my own false self – and I saw that this wasn’t what He wanted me to think.
Consider this: whenever we use the word “enough,” we imply that there is a goal we are striving to reach. If we work hard at it, then we will eventually get there. However, if we don’t get there, then we become failures, and nobody likes to fail! I found myself applying this to doing God’s will: if I pray, work, and love enough, then I’ll be able to do God’s will, but if I don’t do enough, then I can never carry out His will, leading to His rejection of me.
Yet this entire mindset is completely backwards from what God wants! My vocation director taught me a beautiful summarizing statement: Relationship, Identify, Mission (RIM, just like those big fancy rims on cool cars – you’ll never forget this image now!). Essentially, what this tells us is that everything we do has to come from our relationship with God, for it is He who defines who we are. We are His beloved sons and daughters from the fact that He created us and that we are baptized into His family, the Church. Only from this identity does our mission flow – His grace of relationship sustains us in our journey toward love.
However, whenever our thoughts revolve around “enough,” we flip this entire mindset around. “If I don’t do enough (mission), I won’t really be a child of God (identity), leading to my relationship with Him being broken.” In this model, we’re trying to work toward relationship, and it’s no wonder how we often feel like failures because of our finitude and attraction to sin! So much of this broken framework comes from our society: we are taught to work hard to success and to gain excellence, and if we fail, then we have no hope. With God, all of this is different though, for all is based on infinite love.
This simple shift in mentality has brought tremendous grace into my spiritual life and the lives of the friends I’ve shared this with, and I’m sure that several posts in the future will continue on this topic. As we begin to recognize how often our minds say “enough,” may we remember the one circumstance in which the word is tremendously helpful: “Your grace is enough for me!” (2 Cor 12:9).
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