Unqualified for Life

I’m unqualified for my life.

I don’t have a degree in creative writing, but I write books. I majored in psychology so that I wouldn’t have to do math, and go figure, I do bookkeeping and accounting for my husband’s businesses. I don’t believe there is a degree that could teach everything a mom needs to know to raise children, but I’m in the middle of raising three teenaged boys anyway.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

Fortunately, God does.

I love stories, but some aren’t constructive. Especially the ones I tell myself. The conversations in my head fill me with self-doubt and turn me into my own worst enemy. If I allow the wrong self-narrative to run wild, I can talk myself out of anything, even God’s will for my life. Before someone thinks I’m crazy, these voices are quite common, even going back to Biblical times.

Through the burning bush, God informed Moses that He’d heard the Israelites’ cry and vowed to rescue them. God commanded, “Go to Pharaoh and bring my people out of Egypt.” Moses should have had been ecstatic. In Egypt, he’d advocated for ending Israelites’ slavery to the point of killing an Egyptian guard who was beating an Israelite slave. However, instead of hearing his victory cry, Moses listened to a different self-narrative telling him, “You’re unqualified.”

“Who I’m I,” Moses told God, “that I should go to Pharaoh?”
God responded, “I will be with you.”
Yet, Moses’s self-doubt still spun out of control. “What if they don’t believe me? Or what if they listen but say the Lord didn’t really appear to me?” And then, “I’m not eloquent enough.”
God sets him straight, “Who do you think gave human beings mouths? I will teach you what to say.”
However, Moses let the voices in his head top God’s voice and almost missed out on God’s will because he still asked God to send someone else (Exodus 4).

Which voice are we listening to, God’s or our self-doubt? What purpose are we missing because our minds told us a story that we’re not right for the job?

The truth is, we’re all unqualified.

We don’t have the skills, wisdom, or power on our own, but God does, and that makes all the difference.

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