My 7-year-old daughter has recently learned the basics of chess. A friend taught it to her one afternoon, and she was eager to show me what she’d learned.
“Do we have a chess set?” she asked. We journeyed to the basement and dug around in the recesses of one of the cabinets. I produced an old set that had sat unopen for years. “We do,” I declared. We scampered back upstairs to tear open the plastic and set up the pieces.
I have not played chess in a long while, and even then — at that indeterminate moment in time — I was not very good. As we began to move the little plastic soldiers around the board, that inconvenient truth became immediately clear.
“Stop letting me win, Dad,” my daughter protested. She took another of my pawns, knocking it over with her bishop. But she did so tentatively, suspiciously, like it was all an elaborate ruse.
“I’m not,” I said. “Sometimes you have to lose pieces to make progress.” I smiled. Winked. And sometimes you barely remember what the pieces do. But still, my daughter was 7. I’m a grown man. All would be well.
Until it wasn’t. Until somehow I tripped my way into check. There were a few more outbursts — “Don’t let me win!” — but I think even my daughter realized I’d made one too many careless moves. She grew more confident. And, since this was a learning experience after all — or so I told my battered ego — I helped her corner me for good.
“I think you’ve won,” I said.
“I’m going to go tell Mommy,” she said. And she did, grinning.
In the days since, I’ve been thinking a lot about my daughter’s knee-jerk assumption that I was letting her win — something we decidedly never do when playing games in our family. Of course, it makes sense: Here she was, playing a complex game for the (maybe) second time against the old man who had years of experience on her. She didn’t stand a chance! She didn’t know enough. She was destined for failure.
Except she wasn’t. She knew exactly enough, and her opponent was clumsy, overconfident and distracted. Still, she doubted her own abilities, and in that doubt, nearly cannibalized her victory.
Nagging doubt — even when seemingly justified — does us little good. I’m not good enough, strong enough, smart enough. I’m not enough. We look to our friends, to our competitors, to our own family and shrink back into ourselves. I’m nothing compared to… Fill in the blank.
But perhaps the most insidious effect of such unhelpful thinking is that we become paralyzed in all the comparing and consequent despairing.
Instead, we should begin with a simple truth, inherent to who we are: We are God’s beloved. And God has fashioned us as unique and wonderful beings, which means we are necessarily different from one another and absolutely enough. But it’s up to us to reflect on our own giftedness: What, in all our enoughness, is God inviting us to bring to bear in this moment?
We are beloved and we are enough and we are still being invited to become. God is still unfolding within us. Our vocation unfurls like a banner in the wind. Being enough is not the same as being done. And so, we begin each day from the firm foundation of God’s beloved enoughness burning within us. Then, we step confidently into the unknown ready and available to continue becoming.
That persistent voice that insists you can’t possibly be up for the moment at hand? That’s not of God. That’s a distraction of the false spirit.
My daughter is not a chess prodigy. And yes — I did win handily the next time we played. But that temptation to doubt, to think of inevitable failure before the possibility of success — that, I believe, we’ve chased away, at least for a time. Because now my daughter knows she is enough to meet the moment and has the skill to succeed, and so, she continues on enthusiastically.
No one let her win. She simply met the moment and kept going.
The question for us, then, for you and for me, is twofold: Do we believe that we are enough now, in this moment? And, do we encourage others in their enoughness, helping them glimpse the God who beholds them as beloved?
