When You Don’t Believe You Can Do It

“Set goals so big that unless God helps you, you will be a miserable failure.”

~ Bill Bright

I sit over a keyboard and say the words out loud to myself,

“I just can’t do this.”

It’s the same five words I said yesterday as I cleaned up another epic high altitude baking fail, and the same words I said last night when that mothering moment went awry.

“I just can’t do this.”

I just can’t write. Or bake. Or parent well.

And then my own Daddy’s words from long ago come back to me. He would overhear me lamenting as I bent low over Algebra problems or Tchaikovsky rhythms or the periodic table,

“I just can’t do this.”

He would pull me close and remind me I could indeed do it, and didn’t I remember the story about Grandma Rea? About how her teacher marched her class outside the one room schoolhouse, each boy and girl carrying a small slip of paper with the word “can’t” on it?

I would settle in knowing I would hear the story whether I remembered it or not.

Grandma’s teacher brought her students to a portion of grassy earth and told them all to dig a hole, drop the word inside, then patch the earth back up. When the last student finished stomping her hole flat, teacher matter-of-factly declared that from here on out, there was no such word as can’t because they could do anything and everything they set their minds on.

Grown-up me forgets to bury her own can’t words; I’m too busy building with them instead. I construct thick-walled towers with bricks of can’t, impossible, and no way. The tower stretches so far up I must crane my neck backwards to see, and I’m quite sure I’ll never get up it or over it or around it.

Truth is, I need to break up and bury those words like my grandma did. But I need to cover them with more than dirt.

On this chilly morning, Deuteronomy reminds me how the Lord deals with our I-can’t-do-this battles:

Hear, oh Israel, You are about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with large cities that have walls up to the sky. The people are strong and tall – Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: “Who can stand up against the Anakites?” But be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them, he will subdue them before you.   Deuteronomy 9: 1-3

The cities were large. The walls reached the sky. The people were strong and tall. But with God on the side of Israel, none of that amounted to a hill of beans.

I get it now. With God on my side of the battle, I don’t need to believe I can scale walls of can’t or run hurdles over impossible or forge rivers of no way. I just need to believe in the One who goes before me tearing down walls and burying death words so resurrected New Life flourishes.

I just need to believe I can do all things through Christ, the One who fills my gaps and is what I am not.

And this I can do again and again and again.

Because there’s no such word as can’t after all.

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