The Problem With Potential

Have you ever been told, “You have so much potential!”

If so, then you probably took it as a compliment and maybe began to daydream about what could be for your life.

But potential has a problem...how do you know when you reach your potential? You don’t.

In school it was easy to see if you lived up to your potential. Because you put work in and your were immediately given feedback for that work in the form of a grade. If you did your best and got an A than that was your potential. Or if the assignment came easy and you got an A than you needed to be challenged further.

But when you get in the real world, effort and immediate feedback don’t always coincide. And if your like me, you start to wonder, “am I actually reaching my potential?” And your potential even begins to feel like a millstone around your neck, if the results you are seeing don’t correspond with your belief in your potential. “Your potential” can just be another thing you have to live up to in your life and the weight of your own “potential” can leave you feeling exhausted and rejected.

But that’s because you simply can’t know what your potential is. But one thing that has encouraged me to work hard without the weight of “reaching my potential” is when I realized that there are human beings who have no potential. There called dead people.

And the Bible actually calls me, before Jesus rescued me, a dead person. No potential with God. No potential to do anything for God, no potential to receive God’s love. But, because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, he made me alive (potential!), but not the kind of potential that makes me feel like I need to live up to something. But the peace which says, “I had no potential, but God gave me potential again, so my effort is not to prove my love for God or worth as a person, but a response to the grace that was given to this dead guy.”