As a parent to four kids under the age of six, I often experience the daunting weight of inadequacy. The joys of watching these young lives grow is unmatched, but if I’m honest, feelings of being overwhelmed, underprepared, and unqualified show up in my life all the time. With each baby we welcome into the world comes the baffling reality that this new life will be placed into my care. On purpose.
For the four children that fill up my minivan, God decided before he created the sun and the moon that Caleb and Demi Crittendon would be the people responsible for raising, protecting, loving, and parenting them. What was He thinking?
I vividly remember the day that we toured the hospital in preparation for our first baby. I was calm, cool, and collected all the way through the waiting room, labor and delivery section, NICU, and everything else until the tour guide pointed out the window to the parking lot and said, “You’ll want to make sure to have the car seat properly installed in your car so that you can be cleared to take your little one home.”
At that moment it hit me that in a few short months, I would be driving out of that very parking lot with a living, breathing, helpless baby who would be looking to me and his mom to take care of every one of his needs. I froze. Parenting became a reality to me in an instant.
I remember in the days that followed watching videos of how to hold the baby, how to swaddle the baby, why you shouldn’t shake the baby, and everything else I could think of because I just wanted to be ready. My wife read more books than the Summer Reading list about everything under the sun, but guess what? We both showed up at the hospital on September 30th and felt like we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Both of us were a little surprised that the doctors seemed so comfortable with leaving us in a room alone with the baby. I remember thinking I needed to talk the doctors out of it:
“Doc, I know we seem like nice people, but…”
And the strangest part of it all was they actually let us walk out of the hospital and take him with us.
Even still, little by little, we’ve figured things out. Most of the time. My comfort is found in the fact that while I felt completely unqualified and incapable of being a parent, God knew and still chose to make me one. I’m sure all of us have at one time or another felt the weight of inadequacy, and if you haven’t yet, raise a kid. It doesn’t take long for the dust of our pride to settle, causing us to realize just how big a given task or responsibility is. In those moments, it is difficult to accept the calling that has been placed on our lives because we feel so unable to accomplish, but that is precisely where God does his finest work on us.
The entire story of the Bible is one of a powerful God revealing His glory through broken vessels who could not and should not accomplish the mighty things they did, outside of His intervention. We should not be surprised today that He allows for some of us to become parents, lead in ministry, be promoted at work, produce a podcast, coach a team, conduct a surgery, or whatever else may be put on our plates that seems like too daunting of a task.
The beauty of a relationship with Christ is that you are unqualified and incapable of being what you need to be, which puts you in prime focus to be used by God in a way that only He could receive credit for.
In fact, it is only when we accept our own inadequacy to rescue ourselves that we become able to bend the knee to Christ and call out to Him to save us! There are no qualified Christians, only broken ones who have been restored by a merciful healer who delights in making us whole.
This is what Paul was getting at in 1 Corinthians 12:9 when he said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” Christ did not take away Paul’s weakness or insufficiency. Rather, he provided the grace needed to make up for Paul’s weaknesses, and that’s what he does for us. We don’t deserve his grace, but he gives it anyways. We aren’t qualified to be good parents or spouses or students or bosses, or even Christians, for that matter, but he positions us there anyways as a display of his great goodness and grace.
As God reveals our inadequacy, we are stripped of our pride and self-sufficiency and find ourselves more trusting and more dependent upon the only One who truly is sufficient to qualify us.