Look Up When You Don’t Measure Up

When We Don’t Measure Up

It’s exhausting trying to measure up: talking ourselves into thinking we’re strong enough to handle life when it feels heavy or hard. We want to feel like Moses crossing the Red Sea, when most of the time, we feel more like Moses asking God whether He got the whole thing wrong: Who am I, God?

To walk this road. 

To have this story.

To do this thing. 

A part of us knows it isn’t supposed to be that way. 

Our Scripts Run Deep

We are supposed to have identities that don’t cower under other people’s opinions. But new hearts get lined with old things. We carry around suspicions that we are too much or not enough: a parent’s disappointment, careless words, a spouse’s neglect. Looking in the mirror, I can still hear my coach speaking well-intentioned encouragement that shredded me. Our scripts run deep. 

Or else our hearts get painted with things we decide make us matter. The things we rehearse when we start to feel small: achievement, performance, people’s love. Usually it’s both at once. Our lists of demerits and gold stars get tangled together in our understanding of who we are and any thread we pull unravels the whole thing. We still build our lives on contingent foundations, so that success intoxicates us and failure crushes us. 

And eventually life will yank the thread. It will pull on our identities hard enough to make us question who we are and whether God got our story wrong and whether we measure up for our call. Which makes us a lot like Moses. 

Who Am I?

When God called him to go to Pharaoh, Moses wanted an affirmation of his identity. “Who am I to go to Pharaoh and bring a people out of Egypt?” 

Exiled murderers don’t normally lead a nation. Decades watching sheep in the desert isn’t standard training to liberate a people. Yet, every detail of Moses’ life had prepared him for what God was asking him to do, from his infancy in a basket, to his childhood in a palace, to his exile in Midian.

But God doesn’t tell Moses that.

Moses’ question Who am I? gets swallowed up in God’s name: I am who I am – reordering his words, reorienting his question, and redirecting his eyes.

seeanewthing

He didn’t promise that He was knitting the pieces of Moses’ story into his redemptive narrative. God didn’t tell Moses that He would walk through seas on dry land. He didn’t explain how decades in the wilderness would prepare Moses to shepherd the Israelites in the desert.  

Good things. True things. Just not truth.  

Instead, God tells Moses about who God is. Moses’ question Who am I? gets swallowed up in God’s name: I am who I am – reordering his words, reorienting his question, and redirecting his eyes. I wonder how different Moses’ life would have been if he had kept his eyes on his resume. 

Moses’ job was never to become more qualified. It was always to look at God and who He is.

When You Don’t Measure Up, Look Up

We aren’t Moses. We aren’t necessarily called to go to Pharaoh. And we don’t usually get a burning bush.

But hope for him means hope for us when we feel like we don’t measure up. When we stutter or run or hide from our shame. When our families are messy and we’re angry at life. When we’re bumbling shepherds, doing ordinary jobs in ordinary places. When we feel like God got it wrong with us, He is still knitting together every aspect of our lives. He will use our birth, our adoption, our enslavement, our exile, and our freedom. He won’t waste the details. And yet, his answer to our insecurities is still His character and his presence and his name. He loves us too much to let us build our lives on good things that won’t hold in the desert. 

Which is why we get a better assurance than Moses. 

I want a burning bush; He points me to a tree. 

I want a split sea; He points me to a torn veil. 

I want an affirmation of everything I am; He points me to all that He is. 

When we face our own little pharaohs in our own little worlds—loneliness and empty wombs and empty nests; loss and betrayal and disappointment—sometimes we cross on dry land and sometimes we choke on the swells. But He won’t give us a hope that unravels. 

If you need a burning bush today, look for a tree. 

If you need a split sea, look for a torn veil.

If you need to know who you are, look for who He is.

If you feel like you don’t measure up, look up.