Tonight I was chatting with Jill online, and we were talking about Continuum Church’s first outreach event on Saturday, April 19. Of course, this is where it all really comes together for me, so I can’t help but feel a little apprehensive about this. I mean, it’s why I’m here, right? It’s why I gave up my life in Springfield and why some of you are supporting me financially (THANK YOU!). It’s a big deal.

Of course, as a friend would, she reassured me. “You’ll be so incredibly grat.” She caught it immediately and the next moment “great” popped up on the screen.

But that’s my fear! What if I wind up being so incredibly grat? So close to “great,” but not close enough. That’s always been my fear: that I’m just not quite good enough to do what I really want to do.

I know all the right answers to this: God equips those He calls. Obedience is the key, and everything else is up to Him. Look to the successes of the past as proof that this is what you’re supposed to be doing.

I know all that, but let’s be honest: it nags at me anyway. Because I can think of plenty of times in my life when I’ve been grat. It’s not so much thinking that I’m the wrong person for the job, because I know clearly that I’m supposed to be here. It’s really worrying that I might be just that plain old not good enough. Maybe I’m grat, but not great.

It’s just this area too. I feel confident in other things that I’m doing, but I think that this area of leading outreaches is SO IMPORTANT to me that I just don’t want to mess it up. I want it to be perfect. I want everyone participating to have a meaningful, life-shaping experience. I want what we do to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. And, of course, I want everything to go perfectly. I know it won’t, not all of it, but I still want to be good at it.

The more I write this out, the more I realize how me-centered this is. (For those of you who might have somehow missed this about me, I have to process things out loud … or on paper I guess.) I have to admit that it might be as much a fear of the ambiguous “looking stupid” as it is a fear that the outreach won’t be effective. In fact, I think it’s more. I think that I trust God to accomplish his purpose in the work we do, when we go with the right attitude. But I think what’s really bugging me is how other perceive me during that process. It’s all about what people think of me. Or what I think of me when I compare me to someone else who might have been great in that situation.

Dang it. That’s an uncomfortable revelation.