Letter No. 10: When Your Best Isn't Enough
Sometimes the only way to keep fighting is to stop and receive comfort
Dear Friend,
Today I want to tell you the story behind a song. Years ago, in a season I will describe in a moment, I wrote and recorded this song with my bandmates, BlueGrace. You will find the recording attached below, and I would be honored if you gave it a listen — before you read through, or after, or both. But let me tell you where it came from, because I suspect that place is some place you have been, too.
There was a stretch of my life when someone I love dearly was making life choices that could only lead to their destruction. I saw it coming the way you see a storm building on the horizon. And I strained to think how to change the weather. But storms, once gathered, have a way of inevitability.
You may be acquainted with the tactics I tried — I think we all try them at times like this. I talked. I listened. I warned. I prayed. I reasoned until I had no words left. I gave that person every good thing I had to give, and I would have given more if I had possessed it. And still their choices kept coming, and still their road kept bending downward, and there was not one thing in my power that could stop it.
If you have ever stood in that place — loving someone you cannot save, watching a life you treasure move toward its own undoing — then you already understand what I am about to say. This is not the grief of losing something and then, in time, laying it to rest. This is a grief that occupies you. It follows you into the morning, accompanies you through your day, and sits awake patiently with you in your thoughts at night. It is the ache of a battle you cannot walk away from, because the one you are fighting for is someone you cannot and will not stop loving.
And there is a second wound underneath the first one. I want to name it plainly because I think it is the wound most of us hide. Somewhere along the way, most of us came to believe that we are supposed to be equal to whatever challenge life sets in front of us. Capable. Strong enough to carry the weight, wise enough to find the answer, steady enough to hold the people we love together by the sheer force of our care. Cowboy up! And when the day comes that we cannot — when we run straight into a wall we have no power to move — it does not merely make us sad. It makes us feel like we have failed at something we were sure we could do. That is exactly where I landed. I was a failure in my own eyes. Whatever this battle required of me, I did not possess it. To put it in the barest words I own, my best was simply not enough.
This song was born in that soil. I sat down with a guitar and let the music give voice to my groanings. It rose out of me the way a cry rises out of a person who has finally run out of strength. Its opening words say exactly where I was standing: “Beaten down, losing battle, wasn’t man enough today.” Not man enough. Those were not just lyrics I crafted. They were a confession.
Here is the part I most need you to hear, because it is the whole reason for this letter. If you’re hoping to hear that I was handed a solution to the problem the moment I poured out my heart, I’m sorry to disappoint you, because that’s not how it went. In that moment, nothing was fixed. The situation did not suddenly resolve, and the person I was praying for did not suddenly change their ways. There was no answer waiting at the end of my desperation that made the trouble go away. And I think this is precisely where so many of us come undone in our faith — because we have relied upon God to be a fixer, believing that if we only pray hard enough and flex our faith strong enough, the burden will be lifted from us. So, when it is not lifted, we might assume one of several things: that we have failed again, that God was never really there, or, worse, that He is there and simply doesn’t care.
But what met me in that low place was not a solution. It was a Presence — the Holy Presence. When I finally had nowhere else to turn and nothing left to try, I stopped reaching for a way out and leaned instead into the nearness of my Heavenly Father. And He came to me. He did not remove the trouble. He gave Himself to me in the middle of the pain. The only way I knew to say it then is the way the chorus still says it now: “Find my rest, gentle refuge, in the hollow of your hand.”
That picture — the hollow of a hand — is not mine. I borrowed it from God, who has been saying it to His people all along. “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:27). “He gathers His lambs in His arms and carries them close to His heart” (Isaiah 40:11). “Casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). He is “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4) — and notice, please, that it says comfort in our troubles, not always deliverance out of them. There is a hollow in the hand of God, a hidden and sheltered place, and it is shaped exactly to hold a soul that is worn out and weeping and certain it is not strong enough to carry the burdens of the season. To be held there is not the same thing as being rescued. In a way, it is better because it is a comfort that He gives amid your troubles and is not dependent upon a change in your circumstances.
“In the Hollow of Your Hand,” written and performed by Neal Letteney
with BlueGrace for the album Sweet River
So stay a while. Do not scramble to your feet the moment the tears begin to slow. Receive everything He is offering you here — all of it, every measure of the comfort He is pouring over your weeping heart — and do not leave until you have soaked it up. Let Him hold you until you are strengthened. The battle may well still be waiting when you rise. But you will rise as someone who has been comforted by God, and no one comes out of the hollow of His hand unchanged.
Now let me tell you the part I kept from you until now, because you have earned it by sitting with me this far. The one I could not save — the one walking that certain path to ruin — continued on that road and, indeed, suffered accordingly. But later, they repented and came back. That life turned around, and it has been given to following Christ for many years since. I cannot tell you how I praise God for it. But hear me, because this is the very center of what I want you to carry away from this hearth: God’s comfort in that valley was already real, already whole, already enough, long before I had any idea how the story would end — and it would have been every bit as real if the story had ended some other way. His nearness was never a down payment on a desired outcome. He did not hold me because the ending was going to be happy. He held me because He loved me, right there in the dark, in the not-knowing. And that is exactly how He will hold you.
So come up into the hollow of His hand, my friend. Rest in the comfort of His arms. You do not have to be equal to this battle. You do not have to be strong enough, or wise enough, or enough of anything at all. You only have to let yourself be gathered up and held. Listen to the song if it helps you get there. And then rest — proper rest, gentle refuge — for as long as you need, in the hollow of His hand.
Held with you in Christ,
Pastor Neal Letteney <><
For Your Reflection
Take these with you into a quiet moment, or into your prayers, this week:
Where in your life are you carrying a battle you cannot win by being strong enough, and what would it mean to stop reaching for a way out and lean into God’s nearness instead?
Have you quietly believed that God is meant to be a fixer? How might it change your faith to receive His comfort in your trouble rather than only deliverance out of it?
What does the picture of resting “in the hollow of His hand” stir in you, and can you name one place you need to be held there this week?
Is there someone you love whom you cannot save? What would it look like to keep loving them while letting God carry what you could never carry alone?
The Pastor’s Hearth
Letters on Love, Loss, Failure, and the Long Road of Discipleship
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