Being Enough
One time there was a boy who told me how hard he would work to have me.
We were objectively worlds apart. Different lifestyles, different ages, different relationships to faith and work and what we wanted from our remaining years. He was kind in a way that disarmed me at the time: a man who never got defensive, never bristled at correction, never met vulnerability with anything but gentleness. On the surface, this looked like everything wisdom says to want. No ego to manage. No defensiveness to navigate. No trauma making him difficult to love.
But he had never been in a relationship before. Not because of any deep wound or avoidance, but simply because it hadn’t happened yet for him. He wanted one. In From what I remember, he seemed to have wanted it the way I once wanted it in my twenties, before I understood what relationships actually required. No complications, no baggage, but also no skill, no knowledge, no real sense of what he was asking for beyond the wanting itself.
He reminded me of who I used to be.
Looking at partnership as something you achieve through sufficient desire, sufficient effort, sufficient willingness to work hard. As if love were a job you could earn through showing up and trying.
He didn’t care about my complicated family history, and from one angle, this looked like grace: like someone seeing past the mess to the person underneath. From another angle, it looked like someone who didn’t yet understand what he was looking at.
…Until one day my friends had asked something different than him.
I was in the middle of a particularly brutal week everyone knew about, and my friends asked how they could show up. Could they bring food? Keep me company? Sit with me in the hard part rather than checking in once it had passed? But him….he asked how it had gone when all of it was over.
This is the difference I couldn’t unsee once I saw it. Not that he was unkind. He was endlessly kind. But his kindness operated on a delay, a single step behind where my actual needs were. He cared, but he cared from a distance, in the form of a question asked after the fact rather than presence offered during.
My friends knew to show up in the middle. He knew to ask about it at the end. Both come from care. But they’re not the same skill.
Paul writes about being unequally yoked, usually translated as warning against partnership between believers and unbelievers (2 Corinthians 6:14). The image is agricultural: two animals of different sizes or strengths bound to the same plow, pulling against each other rather than together, one straining while the other barely feels the weight.
I’d always understood this as primarily about faith. About not binding yourself to someone who doesn’t share your deepest commitments. And that’s part of it. But I realized something about being unequally yoked through this man, and it had nothing to do with him being beneath me.
This is important, because the easy interpretation is a value judgment.
Judgment being defined as not being good enough, high enough, impressive enough to deserve me. That’s not it at all. It wasn’t about worth. He was a genuinely good man, kinder than most, free of the defensiveness and ego that make so many men exhausting to love. The misalignment was about skillset, not value. We were at completely different places in our capacity for relationship. Not different levels of human worth, but different levels of relational experience and emotional fluency. Yoking us together wouldn’t have meant I was carrying someone inferior. It would have meant constant strain, both of us pulling at different rates, him perpetually feeling the gap between what he could offer and what I needed.
And he would have felt less than. Constantly. Not because I would have made him feel that way, but because the actual demands of partnership at my age, in my circumstances, with my needs, would have repeatedly exceeded what someone at his stage could provide. He would have worked hard. he told me he would, and I believe he meant it. But his hard work still wouldn’t have been enough, and he would have known it, and that knowledge would have eroded him.
But here’s what struck me underneath all of this: we all walk around comparing our efforts and outcomes to what others seem to receive.
Measuring whether what we offer is enough by watching what other people apparently provide and apparently get in return.
He compared his effort to some imagined standard of what would be sufficient to “have” me. My friends, without trying, set a bar through their instinctive showing-up that he couldn’t quite reach. And I found myself evaluating, weighing, measuring….. is this enough? Is the kindness enough to outweigh the skill gap? Is the effort enough to compensate for the experience deficit?
This is exhausting, and I don’t think it’s how God operates.
Scripture keeps insisting that we are enough not because of our effort or output but because of what God has declared over us. Paul writes that God’s grace is sufficient, that His power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). The sufficiency isn’t ours to produce. It’s given.
The whole logic of grace cuts against the logic of “I will work hard enough to be enough.” Because grace says you can’t work hard enough, you were never going to work hard enough, and you don’t have to: the sufficiency comes from elsewhere. From being declared beloved rather than from earning belovedness.
The man who wanted to work hard to have me had collapsed being enough into doing enough. He thought if he just worked hard enough, gave enough, tried enough, he would become sufficient. And he’s not alone in this: it’s the water most of us swim in. The belief that our worth is something we generate through performance, that we’re enough when we’ve done enough, that love is earned through sufficient effort.
But this is precisely backward from how the gospel works.
We don’t work to become enough.
We’re declared enough, and then we work from that sufficiency rather than toward it. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Not after we’d worked hard enough to deserve it. Not once we’d demonstrated sufficient effort. While we were still insufficient by every measure, the declaration came: you are worth dying for.
I think the reason his “I’ll work hard to have you” landed wrong wasn’t just the skill gap. It was that it revealed a whole framework where love is earned through effort, where you make yourself enough through sufficient work, where the other person’s needs are a bar you clear through trying hard enough. And I’ve lived in that framework. I’ve been the one working hard to be enough, measuring my effort against others’ apparent ease, wondering why my trying didn’t produce the outcomes I watched other people receive seemingly without trying at all.
It’s a miserable way to live. And it’s not the gospel.
I believe we are enough because God says so, not because we’ve worked hard enough to earn the designation.
I believe the comparison game of measuring our efforts against others’ outcomes is a trap that never resolves because there’s always someone whose showing-up looks more instinctive than ours. Whose love looks more skilled, whose sufficiency looks more effortless.
And I believe that recognizing a skill misalignment isn’t the same as making a value judgment.
The man wasn’t less than. He was differently placed: earlier in the journey, less practiced in the particular skills that partnership at my stage requires. Choosing not to yoke myself to him wasn’t me deciding he wasn’t good enough. It was me refusing to put him in a position where his sincere effort would be perpetually, painfully insufficient.
Maybe that’s its own kind of love in recognizing that being enough for the right person matters more than working hard to be enough for the wrong one. That sufficiency isn’t something you grind toward but something that fits, that aligns, that doesn’t require either person to strain against a yoke sized wrong. I’m not sure where he is at in life, but I hope he learns what I’m still learning…. that being enough was never supposed to be a job.
It was supposed to be a gift.
