Just Not Good Enough

Ever feel like what you have isn’t good enough to share?  That you wouldn’t mind sharing it to make someone feel better, but you want what you have to be better first?  You’d give up a bed for a weary traveler, but you want your home to be cleaner.  You’d give your children’s old toys to a family who has no toys, but the toys are too used to give to someone else.  You’d even give water to a homeless person standing on the side of the road in the summer’s heat, but you can’t give them the spare bottle you filled from your own tap; it should be originally bottled, seal still in place.

I’m just as bad about these things.  I worry what people will think when what they want isn’t perfection; it’s an easing of their misery.  This came to me this morning sitting in church.  I was sitting beside a lady I didn’t recognize, someone fairly new to our church.  About midway through the service, she started coughing.  Buried in the bottom of my purse was a wrapped piece of lemon honey candy.  However, the wrapper was a little sticky from when this piece and its companion pieces had gotten too warm in my car, so I stuck it in a side pocket and resumed listening to the sermon.

Meanwhile, the poor lady beside me kept coughing.  Would she care if the wrapper were a little sticky, or would she just be grateful for the perfectly fine, clean candy inside?  Finally, I dug it back out of my purse and offered it to her with a whispered, “The wrapper’s a little sticky.”  She took it and thanked me after the service.  She was battling an allergy attack and the lemon-honey combination helped.  More than the candy, though, as this young couple seeks for their church home, maybe they’ll remember that someone from this church cared, even if the wrapper was a little sticky.

We are like that, too.  We look at ourselves and see only the slightly sticky, somewhat linty wrapper, therefore deciding that what we have isn’t good enough.  We never take into consideration the sweet, tasty, comfort-giving candy inside.  We tend to overlook the stuff on the inside – our gifts, talents, compassion, love and empathy – and instead mentally compete with others or ourselves, finally declaring, “I’m just not good enough.”

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