YOU ARE ENOUGH

 

One of my all times favourite film is “Coach Carter”; a 2005 American Teen’s Sport Drama featuring Samuel L. Jackson as “Coach Carter”, a basketball coach of Richmond High School. He was saddled with the responsibility of coaching the basketball team of the high school made up of teenagers surrounded by chaotic environment, filled with attitude and engaged in one form of vice or the other. Indeed, the task before Coach Carter was a hard one, a great mountain that must be moved if those teenagers are to make it to the basketball championship. 

Coach Carter being an Alumni of Richmond High was well acquainted with what it takes to be in such school and environment, where large chunk of the students end up as drop outs, some in prison while others ravaged by teenage pregnancy. The game plan he came with was a holistic one that will handle not only basketball but academics as well, hence one has to reach certain average point in class before he is qualified to play in the basketball team. That wasn’t enough, Coach Carter was a friend, a disciplinarian and above all a motivation to those teenagers in his team. 

Well, this piece is not a film review, but what inspired it was a question Coach Carter kept asking one of his “hard to deal with” player named Cruz; twice Coach Carter asked Cruz: “What is your deepest fear?” In the same line, permit me to ask you same question dear reader, what is your deepest or greatest fear in life? What is it that thing that constantly make you feel less of a person? 

Ever felt as if you are the wrong person facing a particular huddle in life? You see in life, we all are facing battles, none is exempted from the struggles of life. Our fights, battles, challenges, and struggles may not be the same but they are all real and peculiar. At times, you may feel as if the weight of the whole world is on your shoulder, sometimes you have this feeling of incompetence, inadequacy and insufficiency and all you tell yourself is ‘I am not enough”’. Well! We all experience such in life, and our problem is not that we are not enough but we are more than enough without even knowing it. All we need to be all we are designed to be are innate in us. 

Inferring from the movie I started with, Richmond High School has been known to be one of the schools with the highest number of drop outs, with only a minute number of its students making it to college and university. Society has written them off, the system has seen there end from the beginning and lost faith in them, and even the students themselves have accepted the fact that their future is bleak and holds no promises for them, until Coach Carter came into the picture. Even though it was a herculean task, but Coach Carter did changed the narrative through discipline, motivation and installation of self-believe in the mind of those teenagers and the entire school system. 

Doesn’t this captured our reality in some ways? Has our society not written us off overtly or covertly in one way or the other? Hasn’t our various organized systems summarized our lives by frustrating almost everything we set out to do? Because the way things are going in this part of the world, are we not beginning to lose faith in ourselves? I have watched the movie “Coach Carter” severally, and often, I see my sad reality as a person being reflected therein but at the same time I had received countless prodding to live life to the fullest especially through the eventual response of Cruz to Coach Carter. 

Cruz responded to Coach Carter by quoting one of American Authors, Marianne Williamson and I will want this quote to be the icing on the cake of this piece. Please savour on this:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world, there’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do, we were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do same, as we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. 

Again, let me ask you, what is your deepest and greatest fear in life? What are those huddles that are making you feel inadequate, incompetent and not enough?  As stated earlier, we all are experiencing and facing our own diverse fears but we all have what it takes to thrive. I am not here to give you some motivational talk that works automatically without action, rather, this piece aims at giving you a push to first believe God and his innate abilities embedded in you that are far stronger than anything making you feeling not enough and to launch out in faith to face your fears head on because you are enough. 

Don’t play life small, quit feeling inadequate, stop being less of who you are meant to be, because you are enough, you are strong, you are capable, you are sufficient, you are competent and you have all you need to be all you have been designed to be. Trust God, reach out in faith and unleashed the real and- full you. You are simply enough. 

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