Today I’m feeling underqualified. Perhaps because I am feeling overwhelmed. Change makes work. Lots and lots of work. As I make a list of what I need to get done by the end of the week I wonder if I am capable of doing it. Do I have the inter-personal skills to find the needed leaders? Do I have the administrative skills to get everything organized in a timely manner, and in a way that actually makes sense? Is my relationship with God strong enough for me to be poring into other people? Do I have the tenacity to see this transition through? Am I equipped enough to relate to students without being too much like their friend? It may seem strange that after a solid year behind me these things are coming up now, but that’s just it. I look back at the last year, and people thought it went great- I think it went satisfactory. Perhaps this is because I look back at what my intentions were for the year and everywhere I failed to follow through. Perhaps it is simply because I am more critical of things than “people”. Perhaps the real reason has more to do with where I am with God. It’s not pretty. At the root of my insecurity lies the fact that my relationship with God is lacking vitality and realness. It feels formulaic and mundane. I feel like I do what I do because I have to do it. How do you get past this place? Is it just a phase that will end? What do I do in the mean time? How do I pour into the lives of the youth and leaders when I’m not even full? I read “The Shack” and all it did was make me want that relationship back, but I’m stuck.
So I’m starting this year in desperate need of grace. In desperate need of God reaching out to me and drawing me close. Am I qualified to be leading people when I question the genuineness of my relationship with God? Or does this simply mean I’m human and need to work through it? Paul writes to the Corinthian church that weakness is a good thing because it is through our weakness God works. But is God working through this weakness?
“Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take the thorn away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me…For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
-2 Corinthians 12:8-10
