I’m 400 miles from my mother. It is a seldom occurrence that I can sit with her and hold her hand. I hate that distance between us. I miss her. I miss watching her eyebrow raise when I say something sassy, and I miss hearing her equally sassy reply. The apple doesn’t fall far.

My mother is always the last one up in the house. She reads or watches a decorating show on HGTV late into the night after my dad is already tucked in and snoring. She sits in her little maroon chair and enjoys her solitude without my daddy fussing about the president or the church or the grass that’s dying in the backyard. I always steal a few moments of her time when I’m there just to sit with her and visit. We catch up on the garden and on dad and life.

She is so precious to me.

Forty years ago my mother left her traditional Texas life to follow my dad onto the stateside mission field in Idaho. I remember growing up hearing her frustrations about not finding okra or black eyed peas in the grocery store. I remember watching her heart break as she tried to relate to the personalities of the people in the great northwest which is vastly different from the Texas debutant culture of which she was raised. But she challenged herself and changed for the sake of a church minutes from the Grand Tetons and the best trout fishing in the country. I watched my mother learn to snow ski, clean a fish, tent camp, and shovel snow on top of teaching Sunday School every Sunday morning, providing countless meals for potluck dinners, and raising three daughters all while hosting a young church in her living room.

My mother shared Jesus with every coworker she had. She always worked outside the home and always made friends where she worked. This didn’t come naturally to her. She was shy and introverted, but ministry trained her to be otherwise. Jesus developed a natural evangelist out of a woman who hid behind my grandmother’s skirt as a child.

She loved my daddy. She loved her girls. She taught us scripture and demonstrated the art of being a Godly wife and mother. I can still hear her voice when I sing certain hymns. Hymns connect me to my mother’s heart and to God’s as they did her. She never missed a worship service.

As I sat next to my sweet mother that night and listened to her, the conversation quickly turned back to Jesus as it often does in my parents’ home. She looked into my eyes and hers filled with tears and she said, “I just don’t know if I’ve done enough. I just hope I’ve been enough.” My heart broke.

After seventy eight years of following a stubborn preacher around the country leaving the land she knew and parents she loved?
After years of sharing Jesus with three year olds to atheist co-workers?
After countless hours over a hot stove cooking for the sick?
After leading three rather precocious daughters to Jesus?
After a thousand greeting cards mailed to the lonely?
After decades of turning pages of scripture to the point of your bible falling apart?

You, mama? You don’t feel you’ve done enough?

I looked down at her work worn hands folded in her lap and tried to process how a woman who devoted her life to the Lord could believe this.

We are all prone to the same self-doubt disease. We all still believe that what we do can somehow change the mind of God. We all still try to earn His favor. We all still doubt that He will accept us and our mess. The best of us and the worst of us all struggle with this sickness and it does its best to break us.

Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:16

Life will zap any confidence you have.  I lose confidence in the church regularly. I lose confidence in my job, in my purpose, in my abilities, in family, in my friends…the list goes on. People let you down. Sickness comes. Money isn’t reliable. Children leave home. Politicians lie. Putting confidence in life here is risky at best even if you are not a believer. Because we are all on our way out the door and we will trip on our way there. We are not graceful beings, but that is the point.

His grace covers the lack of grace we offer ourselves.

Rest assured there is one thing of which we can be confident, and we can set our life on the outcome. And that is the grace provided to you by God. It’s done. The debt is paid. There is no bill collector. There’s no red tape. There’s no border to sneak across, no forms to fill out, no entry exam. Stop beating yourself up. You waste your time, friend.

Your doubt isn’t in yourself. Your doubt is in the one who already paid the debt. Don’t doubt His sacrifice and insist His death wasn’t enough for you. Thank Him for it. Trust the sacrifice was not in vain and that you reap the eternal reward of what He did. Praise indeed!

Mama, you are enough. You’ve always been enough to me, and I know you are more than enough to Jesus.

Because His grace is enough.

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. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10