THE LAST RIVER MILE

Think about how much of American life depends on the presumption of “not enough.”

Marketing has to convince each of us that we must correct the “not enough” in our lives. You don’t have enough money. Your car isn’t new enough. Your house isn’t big enough. You don’t have enough stuff. Your bandwidth isn’t strong enough. You haven’t experienced enough. You haven’t scrolled on your phone enough. And that phone isn’t current enough. If we suddenly, magically had enough, economies would crash.

“Not enough” has driven much of human history. Rulers and governments lived in fear of not exercising enough power. Nations and tribes scrambled for enough resources and space. If another kingdom had more than yours, then yours had “not enough”, and no price tag of human life was too high to pay to achieve enough.

“Not enough” surrounds and measures every human being. You’re not smart enough, successful enough, pretty enough, popular enough, influential enough. Ask most people whatever their “enough” is and they don’t feel that they have it.

Even faith can be infected with the “not enough” virus. Your faith isn’t strong enough. You’re not praying hard enough or often enough. You don’t go to church enough. You’re not saved enough. You don’t act religious enough. No wonder the number of people self-reporting no religious affiliation continues to skyrocket in this country. Religion becomes just one more thing telling us that we’re not enough.

The great Franciscan thinker and author, Richard Rohr, suggests that the truly radical nature of the good news of Jesus the Christ is this: We have been declared enough. Simply through the enormity of the unimaginable love of the God who breathed life into each of us, we are enough. Enough is not something we can earn, deserve, or anticipate. It is given us. Jesus the crucified and risen is the embodiment of God’s power over all that would define any of us as not enough.

Is it any wonder that the majority of those drawn in wonder to Jesus in the first century were those who had been told all their lives that they were “not enough” by the hierarchies that ruled and defined them? No wonder Jesus was (is) so dangerous.

What would it be like if the good you do or could do wasn’t about trying to overcome not being enough, but rather was done precisely because you ARE enough? How would your life change if you truly believed that God in Christ has gifted you and everyone around you with being enough?

I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.