On saying yes when you feel like the wrong person for the job
I have a note in my phone. It's been there for years, and I've never deleted it because every time I scroll past it I feel both seen and slightly convicted.
It just says: Who do you think you are?
Not in a motivational way. In the other way. The way that creeps in at 2am when you've been working on something that feels too big for you, something you can't quite believe you said yes to, something that — if you're honest — you're not entirely sure you're qualified to be doing.
I think a lot of people in creative and faith work carry a version of that note. Maybe yours says something slightly different. Maybe it sounds like: You're not a real writer. Or: Who's going to listen to you? Or the very specific cruelty of: Someone else could do this so much better.
Whatever it sounds like, the effect is the same. You shrink. You hesitate. You wait to feel ready — and ready never quite arrives.
Moses had a version of that note too.
God shows up in a burning bush — which is already a lot — and tells Moses he's been chosen to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Out of generations of slavery. Out of the grip of Pharaoh.
And Moses, standing in front of an actual miracle, says: not me.
Exodus 4:10–12 (NIV)
Moses said to the Lord, "Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue." The Lord said to him, "Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say."
I love Moses for this. Not because his doubt is admirable, but because it is so deeply human. Here is a man standing in the presence of God, being directly commissioned, and his first response is to list his limitations.
I'm not good with words. I've never been good with words. Even now, talking to You — still not good with words.
And God doesn't argue with his self-assessment. He doesn't say, "Actually Moses, you're a great speaker, you've been underselling yourself." He redirects the whole question. He essentially says: that's not the point. I made your mouth. I'll be in it. Now go.
The calling was never dependent on Moses' qualifications. It was dependent on God's.
That reframe has quietly rearranged something in me.
Because I have spent so much energy trying to become qualified — more read, more experienced, more polished, more certain — before I let myself fully step into what I feel called to do. As if God is waiting for me to hit some invisible benchmark before He can really use me.
But Moses' story suggests something different. It suggests God isn't looking for the most qualified person in the room. He's looking for the one willing to go — and He supplies what's missing.
There's a book I've been working on. I won't say too much about it yet — it still feels new this writing business, the way early things do — but I will say that almost every single day of writing it, I have bumped into some version of Who do you think you are?
Some days it's a whisper. Some days it's loud. Some days I sit at my desk and genuinely wonder if I'm the right person to be writing the thing I'm writing.
And then I remember Moses. Slow of speech. Standing at a burning bush. Being told: go anyway.
I think that's the invitation for all of us who do any kind of creative or faith work — writing, speaking, leading, creating, showing up. The call will almost always feel too large for the person receiving it. That's not a design flaw. I think that's the whole point.
When the work is clearly beyond us, we stop being able to take credit for it. We stop trusting our own eloquence and start trusting the One who made our mouths. We become less impressed with ourselves and more dependent on the God who said go.
And something about that dependency — that daily, humbling, I-cannot-do-this-without-You dependency — might be exactly what He was after all along.
If you're in a season where the thing in front of you feels too big — the calling, the creative work, the next step of faith — I want to offer you the same thing God offered Moses.
Not a pep talk. Not a qualification checklist. Just this:
Now go. I will help you.
That's enough. It always has been.
A question to sit with:
Where in your life are you waiting to feel qualified before you take the next step? What would it look like to go anyway — and trust that God will meet you there?
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