Can I Possibly Love God ‘Enough?’
By Jessica Brodie
Have you ever been surprised by your capacity to love? It’s happened to me over and over, yet I still can’t help but find myself surprised once again.
When my son was born, my love was so powerful I was sure I couldn’t love my second, a daughter, nearly as much (wrong!). When my beloved cat died, I convinced myself no animal would ever hold a place like her in my heart (wrong again!). Repeatedly, God wows me with how he’s able to take a heart like mine, one that should be full to capacity, and just like that, expand it a hundredfold.
Yet recently I came face-to-face with a deep, underlying soul concern I didn’t realize I possessed—one so staggering I was caught completely off-guard.
I realized that, deep down, I harbored a secret fear: I worried I didn’t love God “enough.”
My epiphany stunned me. How could this be—me? A Christian, one who not only has devoted her life to Christ but also her profession, one who’s spent years raising her children in the Lord and encouraging others to surrender to the love of Jesus, at the end of it all just simply… not good enough.
And yet once I recognized the truth, I couldn’t turn away. I needed to wrestle with it and, finally, to accept it.
I discovered all this through a rather innocent exercise: prayer journaling. See, at the beginning of the year, I started a new spiritual discipline. My mind had started wandering during prayer time, and I decided to start expressing my prayers on paper. I use the ACTS model, which stands for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Adoration is expressing how much I love God and God’s perfect nature. Confession is reflecting on ways I’ve gone wrong, sins present and long past, and confessing them to God in an effort to repent and live in alignment with him. Thanksgiving involves taking a few minutes to express all the ways I’m thankful to the Lord, from salvation to family members to ways he has answered prayers. And supplication is asking for things, from healing to guidance to help for a friend or family member who needs something.
The practice has transformed my prayer life. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. Almost every single day I learn something new about myself, God, or my faith journey. I didn’t expect the confession part to be so meaningful and profound. I didn’t expect that focusing so much on thanksgiving meant that, when I got to my requests, I’d be so grateful for what I already had that I naturally felt more content and less in want.
But the biggest shock for me was how difficult my time of adoration would be.
As a person whose love language is words of affirmation, who is naturally expressive and who makes her living this way, I assumed expressing my vast love for God would be the easiest part of prayer journaling. But that part turned out to be the hardest.
I, the so-called Words Girl, struggled with the words. How could anything I possibly say be enough for God? How could I begin to capture God’s might, power, goodness, and vastly perfect love? How could I even describe feelings so glorious?
At first I thought it was because I didn’t want to be fake or disingenuous, using words meant to flatter God with platitudes instead of expressing the genuine, raw emotion and overwhelming sense of joy in my heart for the Lord.
Take the psalms, for instance—they’re filled with adoration, and they’re beautiful. But I didn’t want to mimic someone else’s words. I wanted my own words for God! I wanted to say what I couldn’t imagine knowing how to express.
Everything I wrote felt inadequate. Cliché. Deficient.
Other days, inspired, I’d go on and on about God’s magnificent creation, how he created the sun and the moon, the trillions of stars in the sky, the mountains and the valleys and all of the creatures who crawl or walk or scurry upon it.
But that, too, didn’t feel like “enough.” Praising God for what God did felt… again. Inadequate. Cliché. Deficient.
That’s when it hit me. Alone, just me and my Creator, I realized that all I could offer him was something he already had in the first place. The abilities and passion I had with words all came from him—not me. They were never mine to begin with.
What did I, this lone struggling soul upon the surface of this immense planet, have to offer the One, the great Yahweh, the Lord and King who made it all?
Nothing.
And that’s when my fear settled upon my heart: What if I, in all my weakness, didn’t have enough love in my heart for God? What if my capacity was somehow missing or deficient? What if everything I could possibly dream up to put into words were just, in the end, empty banalities?
Then I remembered the truth: On my own, I’m not enough. But he’s enough for me.
None of us can ever love God enough—because God is God! God is so mighty and perfect and powerful and immeasurable that we can’t possibly match this.
All we can do, like the wise men who knelt before Jesus on that starry night in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago, is present our gifts to the King knowing they’re just a token of appreciation, a shadow of what is truly grand.
I do love my Lord. What matter is not how I express it, whether through words, service, music, healing, or any other way I do. It’s that I do express it, and that I recognize it as a love offering, now and always.
Amen. Thanks be to God.
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