Less Than Awesome

“I am afraid of being less than awesome.”

This phrase quickly and easily summarizes the last year of my life here at the International House of Prayer, Kansas City. Through a series of events I found myself repeatedly face to face with a gross realization. One that paralyzed me and made me never want to talk, sing, pray or interact with another human being ever again. It was the inevitability of failure (according to MY definition of failure, of course). It REALLY hit me when I was asked to speak at the Women’s Conference in October of last year. Uh-oh. But what if I suck? What if I’m not annointed AT ALL. What if I open my mouth to find that nothing in me is effective? Miss ‘Always Has Something to Say In Briefings’ is suddenly wishing for a case of laryngitis or maybe a broken leg. I’m playing worst-case scenario with the idea of pulling a complete no-show. I’d probably get scolded by a couple people and maybe I would never be asked to speak again! Hmmmm ….not too shabby. Words and encouragements that had helped comfort me in the past are now like big sweaty bullies pounding at my confidence and I seriously wanna punch everyone who has ever prophesied to me. “You’re gonna be a ——— someday”…GRRRRR. “Someday” being the key word. Can’t I just remain a “gonna be”? I don’t want to GROW! I just want to BE GROWN! Come ON people! Can you PLEASE just keep prophesying to me while I sit on my butt and eat potato chips! Go ahead, tell me I’ll be in the NBA but don’t expect me to ACTUALLY get on the court and dribble the ball…..I mean….I’m not that good…. but keep it a secret because I don’t want ANYONE to find out.

I love the way Art Katz says it:
” To what degree, therefore, must failure precede a true appropriation of one’s calling? It was true for Paul and Moses, and needs to be for us. Are we willing for the humiliation of failure, allowed and established by God Himself, despite our best, well-meaning intentions? It is only out of the debris and death of that failure, and the mortification of it, that a man can be formed whom God can send. Can a man be formed in any other way? There is something about failure, especially when it isborn out of the best well-meaning intentions to serve God, thatdoes the depth of work in the human soul like nothing else can. The fact that we have not experienced failure is a statement that we have neither sought nor had apostolic intention. We have timidly played it ‘close to the vest’. We avoid the humiliation of failure and seek rather to ‘get by’.
There was a largesse of soul that was to be seen in both Paul and Moses, and it is this largesse that was not satisfied, but had its birth out of the intensity of a heart for God. When God finds such a one as that, even in his own error, than there is more potential for him than those who purport to be God’s friends, who have not that intensity, but would rather drift along, and whose lives are lackluster and undistinguished before God. Peter failed dismally, but out of that great failure came a great apostle.”

These are comforting words, no? The disciples were a rag-tag band of fumbling bumbling dorks (and I’m sure they would be the first to admit it). So come on, let’s just let the cat out of the bag. We’re ALL less than awesome. Let’s not be afraid to grow up IN FRONT of people. And, for the love of apostolic foundations, stop being surprised and disappointed when you thought someone was about as spiritual as one can get and then they say something dumb or sing off key or have a bad day and get an attitude. We’ll all end up humbler and more like Jesus, who, by the way, spent 30 years “growing up” in Nazareth and how do you know he was a good carpenter? What if his stuff wasn’t that good? I’m just sayin……”Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”….. So, today let us glory in our less-than-awesomeness and in the day of glory look at eachother with an affectionate and  knowing glimmer in our eye.