Will I Be Enough?

Do you ever have those moments (or hours or days) when you feel like a caricature of your worst and yet most familiar fears? I was there when I cried in the shower after work, and ate, and scrolled across my tablet screen, and ate, and scrolled across my tablet screen, and ate some more to hide from the feelings that I hate. You get the idea.

I'm so weary of this.

I watched the newest version of Cinderella tonight. At the climax of the movie, the kind and beautiful heroine finds herself locked in an old attic, dressed in rags, and verbally abused by her bitter stepmother: "You are nothing; you don't matter, and I forbid you to leave!" These are the words thrown at her at the same moment one of prince's troops has finally found her and invites her to come out of the attic. The burly henchman puts the mother in her place:

"The KING forbids you to forbid her to leave!

How dare you rebel against an officer of the KING that way!"

As in all good fairy tales, the moment of truth had arrived and the girl was being offered freedom from her deepest fears and most painful circumstances. She could follow the officer out the door, never to return.

But the twist to her choice is this: if she leaves and joins the prince, she has to admit to him that she's not actually a princess (as he thinks). She's just a girl. A commoner.

"Will I be enough?" She asks herself as she peers at her soot covered face in the mirror.

In the end, she decides to leave the attic and the lies behind her. She thinks enough of herself to ignore her stepmother, and yet, at the same time, she doesn't think too much of herself to by pretending to be something she isn't. So she offers...just herself in rags...to the prince, and he accepts her and makes her a princess after all.

Princess stories don't normally make my heart flutter. All the pink fluff and glitter and corny dreamy princes usually seem overdone and garishly sentimental to me. But this time, her plaintive question in the mirror, "will I be enough?" echoed a similar question in my own heart. It's the same question unanswered that had me crying in the shower and eating and scrolling earlier this evening.

When Cinderella decided to leave the attic, she offered herself, whether she was enough or not. In a sense, she wasn't really ready to live in the castle in her current state, but to get there, she had to be completely honest about what she really was. It was this act of vulnerability that set the stage for her rescue. In a similar way for me, maybe the question, "will I be enough?" is beside the point. If I'm brave enough to stand without hiding before God, I may be setting myself up for a grand rescue away from my own "attic."

No Words Yet

A year ago I wrote about joy (Joy Comes) when I didn't feel any joy. But it did come and is coming here:



There's some kind of clog between my heart and my tongue (and by extension, my pen) these days and I'm not sure why. It's like calcification growing on a bone--the awkward bump that remains after the messy part of healing is over. A clog. A bump. A blockage? However, whatever you want to call it, the more compellingly important thing is that my heart is fleshy and pink, healthy and slowly growing  a new batch of hope. I want to tell people about it, about my hope, but like I just said, my words are having trouble getting past the blocks and out of my insides to my tongue.

Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not even sure that this new thing inside me is even "word-able" yet. Or maybe there are actually so MANY words that I know if I started letting them out all my guts might come out too, and I'm not sure I really want to create that kind of wet squishy mess right here. At least not yet.

But here's to undefined hope, and to pink fleshy-ness after long grey coldness. Here's to life.