She wasn't expecting to cry in a parking lot.
We had just walked outside from a gathering, and I was encouraging her about an opportunity — a chance to step into her gifts in a way that could make a real difference. Mid-sentence, her eyes filled with tears. She looked down at the pavement, shaking her head slowly.
"There are people so much more qualified than me."
She wasn't fishing for a compliment. She believed it. Standing under those parking lot lights, she couldn't reconcile what I was telling her about her gifts with what she had already decided about herself.
I've seen that look more times than I can count. The downward glance. The face that says I want this to be true, but I can't let myself believe it. Sometimes it's tears. Sometimes it's a long silence. Sometimes it's a quick change of subject.
And every time, I recognize it — because I've been there too. Just not in the way you might expect.
Two Kinds of Stuck#
Over the years, I've noticed that people get stuck in two very different places.
The first is the one we talk about most. It's the person who feels too inferior or too broken — too unqualified, too stained by their past, too ordinary, too aware of their failures to believe God could want them for anything meaningful. Sometimes they can point to a specific wound. Other times they can't name the cause at all — they just know the feeling. A quiet certainty that someone else should be standing where they are. They've internalized a theology that starts with damage, and whether they recognize it or not, it's shaped how they see themselves. That was the woman in the parking lot. She had gifts. Others could see them clearly. But a deep sense of inadequacy — not from any single failure, but from a lifetime of measuring herself against everyone else — had built a wall she couldn't climb over.
The second is one we almost never name. It's the person who feels too driven — too ambitious, too hungry for impact, too restless to sit still. They don't struggle with feeling worthless. They struggle with guilt about wanting more. They've been quietly told — by sermons, by Christian culture, by the unspoken rules of humility — that their desire to build something, to lead something, to make a dent in the world is somehow at odds with following Jesus.
They don't need to be told they matter. They need to be told that the fire inside them isn't pride — it's purpose.
I was the second person.
When Theology and Instinct Collide#
I had always dreamed big. I was motivated, driven, and frankly, I didn't wait around for permission to move forward. But there was always this friction underneath it all — a brokenness theology that made my desire to make a difference feel like it grated against what a "good Christian" was supposed to want.
Wasn't I supposed to decrease so He could increase? Wasn't ambition just a dressed-up version of pride? The theology I'd inherited didn't have a good category for someone who loved God and wanted to build things that changed the world.
The shift didn't come all at once. It started in seminary — not with a single class or a single book, but with a slow, thorough rounding out of my theology. I was learning systematic theology, studying Hebrew, and for the first time, learning to read Scripture not as a collection of disconnected passages but as a metanarrative — a story that runs from beginning to end. That changed everything. When you see how the pieces cohesively fit together, you start to root out inaccuracies that had been handed to you as gospel truth.
Studying Hebrew slowed me down enough to sit with Genesis 1 and 2 word by word — barah, tselem, radah, tob — and something started to open up. You begin to see that God didn't create humans to be passive, merely falling in line with a moral code. He created them to cultivate, to lead, to build. The mandate was there before the fall. The calling was embedded in the design.
Around that same season, I read Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright, and it cracked something wider still. God doesn't come to scrap the world — He comes to renew it. Jesus taught us to pray that God's Kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven. Not that we'd escape earth for heaven.
These weren't isolated discoveries — they were part of a larger theological awakening. And the cumulative effect changed me. Suddenly, the drive I'd felt my whole life wasn't something to repent of. It was something to steward. My ambition wasn't the problem. My theology had been too small for it.
The Permission#
So here it is. The thing I say to the woman in the parking lot. The thing I had to learn for myself. The thing you might need to hear today.
You were designed before you were damaged.
The truest thing about you is not your worst moment. It's not your failure, your addiction, your divorce, your bankruptcy, or whatever chapter you keep rereading. And it's not the quiet voice that tells you someone else could do it better — that you're not enough, not ready, not the right person. The truest thing about you was written in Genesis 1 — that you are loved by God, an Image-bearer of the living God, created with intention, given a calling, and commissioned to reflect His goodness to the world.
And if you're the driven one — the one who's felt guilty about your ambition, who's wondered if wanting to build something great is somehow unspiritual — hear this: that fire was put there on purpose. You don't need to apologize for it. You need to align it. Can ambition run apart from God? Of course. But the answer to misaligned ambition isn't less ambition — it's surrendered ambition. The question was never whether you should burn for something. It's who you're burning for.
You have permission to stop defining yourself by your brokenness — or by your smallness.
You have permission to believe your work matters — not just the "ministry" parts, but the Monday morning parts.
You have permission to step into your calling before you feel ready.
You have permission to trust that the God who designed you knew what He was doing.
The truest thing about you was written in Genesis 1 — that you are loved by God, an Image-bearer of the living God, created with intention, given a calling, and commissioned to reflect His goodness to the world.
Permission Isn't the Destination#
But let me be clear — permission is a doorway, not a destination. It's the first breath after being underwater. It matters. But it's what comes next that changes your life.
Once you accept that you were designed before you were damaged, the question shifts. It's no longer Am I enough? It's What was I made for?
That's the question worth spending your life answering. And you don't have to answer it alone.
Over the past few weeks, we've explored what happens when we stop at weed removal, why starting the Bible at Genesis 3 distorts our self-understanding, and what Image-bearing theology looks like in everyday life. This is the foundation. And now the real work begins — not the work of fixing yourself, but the work of discovering what God already put inside you.
You've been given permission.
You were designed before you were damaged. Now go find out what you were designed for.