EVEN TO THYSELF, BE ENOUGH: Learning to Pursue Greatness Without Losing Satisfaction.

Hey there dear gist partner.

How are you doing today? It is my hope that you are doing well and that you continue to find satisfaction in God.

It’s another Guest Feature Thursday!! Our guest for today is one of the sweetest and smartest women you’ll ever come across, I absolutely love how she reasons and I am so honoured to have her here on the blog today. When I read her piece, I had to take a moment to pray for myself because her words gave me a new perspective on certain things in my heart. I’ve been ruminating on them for a few days now and I am so glad I get to share them with you, I know you’ll definitely learn. She’s Shalom Andemi, Esq.; lawyer, writer and woman of God extraordinaire!

So, without further ado, welcome to today’s gist.

Achenyo, it is an absolute honour and pleasure to write to you alongside other Gist partners. For today, however, I want to play the bad guy.

Many of us are aware of the fantasy that exists these days about “self.” People are constantly told to love themselves, live for themselves, and do everything for themselves, as though that alone settles the issues that come with life. These days, everyone talks about self so much that people fail to realise that even to thyself, you could be a liar, a hypocrite, and unkind.

Coming from someone who has never really taken on the pressure of the world, the only pressures I have ever experienced are those I set for myself. I grew up with parents who trusted me to do the right thing. They reprimanded me when necessary and recommended things to me when they thought it best. Whenever I said “no” to them, we would have a discussion about my alternative. Because of this, I grew up with the notion of making myself proud, never about making anyone else proud. 

My reasoning was simple: if I made others the basis of my abilities, I would eventually become dishonest in my bid to keep up with their expectations. So, in order to avoid the pressure of other people’s expectations, I replaced it with my own.

At first glance, one might think, Ah! Easy! Great! However, coming from someone who has been in those shoes for the longest time in my little life on earth, it has not always been great.

Today, I want to share a part of my journey with you, the journey towards being enough for myself and learning to be satisfied. I am not there yet, but I am already on the path.

One thing you should know about me is that I am overly ambitious. I set great heights for myself and actively work towards them. The problem, however, is that even though these were heights I set for myself and worked towards, I often did not achieve many of them. That became the root cause of my sadness and pain.

Many times, others would excitedly celebrate my results, say congratulations, and rejoice at the news of my “success.” But internally, I hated myself more with each passing day. I hated that I could not even meet my own expectations. In fact, I hated it so much that I was rarely happy.

I never sat in my wins long enough to appreciate them, because to me they were not wins. To me, they were evidence of my inadequacies.

No one really understood this. They thought I was simply a whining winner. What they could not see was that, from my perspective, those results were not victories.

So, I turned to God.

I would cry deeply, and my prayers often sounded like this:

“If you knew you were not going to make me achieve these goals, why did you place the desire in my heart to want them? 

Take away the desire. 

Make me like everyone else. 

Make my dreams smaller and my burdens lighter.

Let me want small things so that when I achieve them, I can finally be happy.”

I prayed that prayer in tears almost every time my results came in from one endeavour or another. The way God ignored me was very loud, because the dreams and desires only grew bigger and louder.

The strange thing is that, from every other point of view, I was not a failure. It was only from the point where I stood that I saw myself that way. In fact, if my friends had presented my results as theirs, I would have been genuinely excited for them. Yet somehow, I could never be that excited for myself.

So here I was, a young lady who had never truly sat down to relish her wins because, although they were wins, by my standards they were simply not enough.

Eventually, I began to reflect on my life and realised that I had never truly been happy with myself or with what I had achieved in my short time on earth. That was when I decided that something had to change.

I began what I now call the “enough journey.”

I went back to God and asked for forgiveness for the foolish prayers I had made about taking away my desire for greatness. Instead, I asked Him to replace them with the desire to be enough and to be satisfied.

I told God that I believed I was destined for greatness, and that perhaps that was why I had never had small dreams. But I asked Him to make me happy with what I have, with what I have achieved, and with where I am in the present.

I asked Him to teach me something new: that even if I do not always meet my own standards, I am enough.

I would be lying if I said the journey has been easy. It has been a constant battle between my greedy self and the version of me that is learning to be satisfied.

These days I still set goals. Sometimes I do not meet them. In those moments I feel the old version of myself wanting to return, the one that would sulk endlessly. But then I remind myself that I am on a journey toward satisfaction, and I simply say, “Thank you, God.”

Sometimes when people remind me that I have not achieved a goal, I tell them I do not care and that I am satisfied. Some days I say that to convince myself. Other days, I say it because it is genuinely true.

So, while on this journey of learning to be enough, I thought to share this with someone out there who may be walking a similar path. Sometimes all that is required is a simple but difficult shift: change the posture of your heart!

Then hold firmly to God.

For those who may be about to fall into the trap I once fell into, I would boldly advise this: do not take this path without the right posture. Your heart must be properly aligned, and your will must be fully rested in Christ.

Until next time, I hope you have been encouraged, and I hope you find comfort in Philippians (Php) 2:13 CJB

for God is the one working among you both the willing and the working for what pleases him. 

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts Ma’am, I am such a grateful beneficiary, God bless you. And thank you dear gist partner for being here today, I know you’ve learned a lot today, I pray that God helps you to apply it.

TUNES AND THOUGHTS: our song recommendation for this week, courtesy of incredible guest, is ‘Let it show’ by Kaestrings. This song is a prayer to God that our lives actually show evidence of the change that happens when we meet Jesus; that our proclamations move beyond mere words and become our actual reality. I pray that it blesses your heart and stirs up your hunger for more in God.

 Audiomack: https://audiomack.com/kaestrings/song/let-it-show-live?share-user-id=140072136 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/0qShlAPNKT5UHib8bLn3X2?si=wg8PqmrVQ_2I38u-PY_6_Q 

YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=QaGXi48_TKU&si=iSQtgz8Vdh6Wo3Rh 

Well, that is that about that as far as that is concerned, see you soon.

 

Love,

Achenyo.

 

PS. As crazy as it sounds, on Sunday would be 1 year since my father passed💔. These days leading to that day have opened me up to a new level of heartbreak, pleas I ask that you keep me and my family in your prayers.