Do you ever wonder if you’re not enough?

I heard my daughter in another room banging her hands on her keyboard. She was practicing for her recital the next day and growing frustrated when her fingers didn’t properly dance across the keys to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”np

The cacophony ceased, and I walked in to find her crying into her hands. I took her in my arms and asked, “What’s wrong, baby girl?” 

“I can’t get it right,” she sobbed. “I need to play it perfectly!”

I wonder where she gets that from, I thought. I remembered the same perfectionist anxiety I carried as a little girl—singing a solo at church, taking a test, or playing in my own piano recitals. I held her tenderly in my arms, empathizing with the familiar weight of perfectionism.

Anxiety rose as the plane lifted off, and I did what I always do when I feel overwhelmed: I started making a list. I wrote down all the ways I would jump back into everything once I got home.

However, halfway through drafting a habit tracker, the Lord gently reminded me: my relationship with him isn’t another checklist to conquer or appointment to squeeze into my schedule. In a season that already feels out of control, Jesus invites me to abide—to rest in him through small, simple rhythms that bring calm to the rest of my life.

Jesus does not ask us to try to fit him into the margins of our already overloaded days. Instead, he invites us to let him restructure our days around the cross so that he can bear the weight for us.

“Everything is so green!” I exclaim as the wind whips through my hair and the pontoon boat skims across the water. The scenery is so vibrant, it looks like something out of a cartoon.

“Yeah, it’s wild how different everything looks when we’re not in a drought,” my friend says.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” I pause, letting her words settle in.

I remember the dry, brown days last summer, and the summer before, and pretty much every summer since we moved to this area. We’ve had several years of official droughts, and even when we weren’t officially in a drought season, the landscape was always a faded green at best.