Wrangler Dani

I’ve been reading this every day for the last week: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.” It’s the first part of Romans 12, a chapter that Adam has long loved but hasn’t struck me until this year; this summer, really.

My everyday, ordinary life is full – a farm-full of animals, a calendar-full of plans, a house-full of hungry tiny people. Maybe it’s too full, sometimes I wonder if I can even carry it to the altar, if my back will break under the weight of it all. I have some big dreams that I’m squeezing in at nap times and in-between times. When I do embrace a dream, I apologize for it, guiltily scurrying after my hopes instead of believing that God has given me grace for both my family and myself.

I texted a former horsey coworker and dear friend recently and asked her how to stop apologizing when I teach horseback riding at the barn – I feel so inadequate and I am so very aware of my own shortcomings – what could be a gift of humility has reached a point of self-disgust, as I flail wildly in search of balance. She replied, simply: “you are enough.”

YOU ARE ENOUGH.

This – your everyday, ordinary, walking-around life – is enough. This is all the offering God requires, the best gift I can give to him.

When I look around my none-too-tidy house and my little bank account, when I think of the many ways that I am not the mother, wife, friend, instructor, writer I wish I could be – it is enough. I am enough. All I have to do is what many memoirists simply call “The Work” – the job before us, the story that is only ours to tell, the everyday, ordinary, walking-around that only we can do.

I can strive to be better and ask for grace to grow. But I do not have to live in shame because I am not who I wish I was, I don’t have to apologize for my dreams, my existence, my hope. Because the text doesn’t say, “figure it out you terrible human and stop being so bad at everything” – it says, “here’s what I want you to do, God helping you”.

God helping you.

Maybe I can’t believe that I’m enough when I’m on my own. Maybe God helping me looks like the kind, wise text from an old friend, who knew what to say when I felt most worthless. Maybe it’s long twilights spent in the presence of horses, listening to their breath and letting them remind me what I already know. Maybe it’s the kindness of my husband, taking the baby at 3 am even though it’s my turn, even though we’re both exhausted. Maybe God is here, in my everyday, ordinary, walking-around existence, in fire-pit laughter and late-night budgets and high hopes and toddler tantrums.

Later in the chapter it says, “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.”

I don’t think I can love from the center until I’ve laid the mundane down, let the little things go and the big things shine through. I certainly can’t love deeply if I’m embarrassed by own existence – a person who can’t love herself can’t love anyone else either.

I want to be that kind of love – I want my kids to remember a deep, centered love, a house that clung with dear life to good. I want to live this everyday, ordinary, walking-around life with intention, laying it down as an offering to God with his help, a life that proclaims redemption and hope, not cringing shame.

Until I remember it in my gut I’m going to be reading Romans 12, and repeating to myself, as often as I must: YOU ARE ENOUGH.

Say it with me?