You hear it all the time: “I’m doing the best that I can.” It comes out of the mouth of the kid playing little league baseball, the mom parenting three kids, and the corporate executive drowning under mounting deadlines. And I say it too—a lot. If not out loud, it’s often a frequent part of my inner dialogue.
I resonate with these words because they faithfully capture what happens when I bump up against my finitude. When I come face to face with my creatureliness, I can only say, “I’m doing the best that I can.” I have limits—and I reach my limits.
One such area of my life is public speaking. While it’s a necessary component of my job, it’s not one that I’ve grown particularly comfortable with, nor substantially better at over time. Even with the addition of seminars, helpful suggestions, and years of practice, I still have that constant feeling of being a fish out of water.
Because of what this looks like in my life, I tend to think of “I’m doing the best I can” as a kind of feeble prayer. My internal repetition of this phrase is an appeal to the perfect and
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
