There’s a moment many of us have been through. You’re pacing outside a building, or sitting in a parked car, or hiding in a bathroom trying to work up courage. Just on the other side of the door is something that matters. An interview. A test. A conversation. A presentation you have prepared for weeks. A room you are about to walk into.
But something has happened in the last sixty seconds.
While a hopeful, convinced, and maybe even confident version of you had decided to enter into this moment, that version has vanished. Perhaps it’s still in there somewhere. Instead, however, a smaller version has taken its place. It is the smaller version of you that is going to walk through that door. The bigger one — the one who said yes to this in the first place, the one who knew this was right, the one who could see exactly why you should be the one in this moment — has gone strangely quiet.
The smaller version dwells on key questions.
Who do you think you are?
Why did you say yes to this?
What right do you have to be here?
What are you going to do when they figure out you are not who they think you are?
You take a breath. You stand up straight. Maybe you make it through the door. But, even if you do, something in you has already given up.
If you have ever lived through that moment, this series is for you.
What just happened?#
I want to reflect on that moment, because most of us have lived through it dozens of times without ever stopping to notice what actually happened in it.
We tend to call it nerves or anxiety. We assume that the smaller voice is the sound of hard things. We assume that confident people are much more capable than ourselves — or perhaps more deluded if we know they have no business being confident. So, we keep doing what we’ve always done. Take a deep breath. Try to push through. Hope it goes well. Promise ourselves we will be more prepared next time.
But the smaller voice was not about preparation. It didn’t show up because you had not done your homework. It wasn’t even about the room you were walking into either. The questions it posed were not questions about the moment. They were questions about you.
Who do you think you are?
That is not a question about the interview.
It is a question about your identity, masquerading as a question about the moment. By the time you walked through the door, something quieter than nerves had shifted in you. A story about who you are had quietly pushed past the version of you who knew why you were there in the first place. And that story tends to win.
It’s been winning for years.
The questions it posed were not questions about the moment. They were questions about you.
A story we have all told ourselves#
There is an ancient story that I think gets to the heart of this.
In the book of Numbers, twelve men are sent to scout out a piece of land. The land is good. The land has been promised. The land has, in a real sense, already been given. They cross the border, walk the territory, and take in everything they see. They discover more than a land that could provide for basic needs. You see, this was a land of abundance. They find milk, honey, and grapes so heavy that two men have to carry a single cluster between them on a pole. It lives up to everything they had been told and more.
But the report ten of them bring back is not really a report about the land. It is a report about themselves.
They describe a place where giants live. They describe walled cities. They describe people of great size. And then they say something that should stop us in our tracks every time we read it:
To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers.
That is not a sentence about the giants. It is a sentence about how the spies saw themselves. In their own eyes, they had already shrunk. By the time the giants weighed in — if the giants ever actually said anything at all — there was no further verdict left to deliver. They had pronounced one on themselves. They walked into the moment already feeling tiny.
I want you to notice how familiar that is.
The building. The car. The bathroom. The breath taken before the door. The version of you that has gone quiet and the smaller version that has shown up to take its place. The verdict of inadequacy that arrives before the moment does.
This is not a new story. This is one of the oldest stories there is. And the people who lived it then were not weaker, more anxious, or less prepared than we are. They were exactly like us, and we are exactly like them. Image-bearers of God carrying a sense of themselves that was somehow smaller than the moment they were standing in.
Over three thousand years later, we are still carrying it.
The grasshopper lie#
I want to give that experience a name, because over the next several weeks we will keep returning to it. I am calling it the grasshopper lie — the inner story we carry that makes us shrink at the doorstep of what matters most, even when the very thing in front of us is exactly where we were meant to stand.
Over time, it becomes a lens through which we see the world. Ourselves smaller. Others larger. The moment too big for who we have decided we are.
It is a lie, not because the smallness does not feel real, but because the smallness is not the full truth. The smallness is a story we are carrying. And like every story, it has a beginning, a middle, and – if we are willing to look at it honestly – an ending.
This series is going to walk through that story together.
We will look at where the lie comes from. We will look at why the world's voice tends to confirm it so easily. We will look at what was true about us long before any of these voices ever weighed in. And we will look at what it means to walk into the moment we are facing as the people God actually made us to be — not the smaller version that keeps showing up at the doorstep, but the original.
I am not going to give you the answers in this post. The answers come later, and they come more slowly than most of us would like. They have to. What is planted at the level of identity has to be displaced at the same level. There is no viral one-liner for this. There is no pep talk that touches it. The grasshopper lie has been quietly running for a long time, and it will not be undone in a single sitting.
But I want to give you one thing today, and I think it is the most important thing.
The grasshopper lie — the inner story we carry that makes us shrink at the doorstep of what matters most, even when the very thing in front of us is exactly where we were meant to stand.
The first thing to know#
The moment you have been living through — the parking lot moment, the bathroom moment, the version of you that quietly shrinks at the doorstep of what matters — is not unique to you. It is not the result of you being unusually weak, unusually unqualified, or unusually broken.
The story you have been carrying is shared by Image-bearers across thousands of years, and by every reader of these words. You are not the first to feel this. You are not even close.
Over three thousand years ago, in a different language and a different location, ten people stood at the edge of what they had been promised and said the same thing about themselves that you have been saying about yourself. They were not weaker than you. They were not less prepared. They were Image-bearers carrying a story about who they were that was somehow smaller than the abundance that had been given to them.
Across the centuries, that story has kept finding new mouths to repeat it. It found yours. It found mine.
We will spend the next several weeks figuring out where the story comes from, why it carries such weight, and what was true long before it ever was. There is a deeper word that has been spoken about you. We will get to it.
But for today, the most important thing I can give you is this:
You are not alone outside the door.
You never were.