For Days When Your Best is Nowhere Near Enough...

A beloved professor of mine once pointed out an interesting principle in human terminology. The phrase "Do your best" seems to have a skewed meaning. Said professor admitted that when he was a kid, and his parents would tell him, "do your best" he always knew that what they really meant was "do THE best".

"So which is it, that seems like a pretty crucial conjunction!"...

There is a world of difference between doing ones best and doing (or being) the best. Take, for example, the following (made up) scenario:

Timmy was SO excited for his first day of Kindergarten. He had watched so many of his older brothers and sisters go to school and come home toting their little backpacks brimming over with intriguingly colored pieces of paper, chewed up pencils, dime store calculators, and "Good Job" sticker plastered homework assignments. Now it was his turn to shine.

"Good luck, honey" Timmy's mother said with a perfect smile. "Now remember, whatever happens, just do your best!"

Timmy wanted very hard to please his mother, so he toddled into the classroom, walked promptly over to the shelf, pulled down a grammar book and proceeded to pour over its pages, thus simultaneously learning how to read and write properly in one fell swoop! But that was just before the first recess! Surely we can expect more than just this simple task from our little protagonist! When he reentered the classroom after having mastered the games of kickball, t-ball, tether ball, and foursquare all in fifteen minutes, he pulled a book of elementary mathematics off of the shelf, and used his newly acquired reading skills to hone his math skills, until he had conjured up a fairly sophisticated (if not world changing) modified quantum model of the atom. Imagine how proud little Timmy was hanging THAT up on the fridge. Surely little Timmy had done his best, and the world all was as it should be.

So many people think that if this does not describe their first day of kindergarten, they must not have done their best. What about a less dramatic scenario, that takes my argument to a different level.

Sally was nervous for her first day of school, but she pulled the shoulder straps of her pink barbie backpack tightly over her shoulders, nodded when her mother yelled "do your best", and marched into the classroom. That day, poor Sally broke four pencils trying to learn to write the letter "A", suffocated the class pet fish, and spilled the contents of her pencil box all over the room. But that was only before the first recess! After fifteen minutes made up of 1.2 seconds of jump roping, .8 seconds of falling, and 14 minutes and 58 seconds of nursing a scraped knee, Sally reentered the room determined to make the most of the next few hours. She made the most of them all right! Those few after-recess hours were more than enough time to be laughed at for singing off-key, dropping the chalk under the teacher's desk while trying to write the never-to-be-mastered letter "A" on the blackboard, and accidentally erasing part of Timmy's great quantum equation that was already on its way to winning the Nobel Prize. (Luckily for Sally, Timmy already had the equation memorized before he wrote it out, so it was no problem for him to write it up again. He wasn't even mad! The very picture of magnanimity!)

So! That means that one of the children did their best and the other didn't, right? I mean, COME ON!!! How can both of the children have done their best, when one graduated from seven Universities with honorary PhD's four days later, and the other finally learned to recognize the letter "A" in the same amount of time? Open and closed case...

Unfortunately, life is not that simple. The tricky thing with humane statements such as, "do the best with what you have" or "not everyone's best is the same" is that such statements carry such profoundly complicated truths in them that we will never fully understand their meaning in this life.

Both of the children may or may not have done their best. What if Timmy purposely left some of the information out of his model because he wanted to be able to claim the prize next year as well. OR what if Sally really did know how to write the letter A all along and she was only selfishly trying to get attention from teacher?

BUT, what if Timmy has an inferiority complex because his older brother has won 32 Nobel prizes, and his mother says that he cannot eat until he gets at least 2? What if Sally is severely neglected at home and does not know proper ways to get attention from others without acting out?

You see, it's even more complicated than what we think! Not only is everyone's best different, but there are not surefire ways of telling from the outside what someone's best is.

To take it even further, an individual's best may vary from day to day. Some days I get to the library first thing and read several chapters and take several quizzes before class. I then go to six hours straight of classes with no breaks, take meticulous notes, and make insightful comments. After that, I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in the library reading assignments, pouring over Spanish poetry and working on research for a long paper. I then go home, eat a healthy dinner, do Yoga, read my scriptures, write in my journal, get ready for bed, send a pick-me-up text to a friend who is having a bad day, and lights out. Wow, I must have done my best that day!

But wait! That's not the end of the story... you say that the next day I am overcome by a bout of depression due to some extenuating circumstances in my life, and I can't get out of bed? Some of my hormones have gone out of whack, and I can't stop sleeping? When I do get up, the most I can do is crawl to the couch and watch movies for the rest of the day, not replying to any e-mails of class-mates asking for help on an assignment? Surely this day I did not do my best. By all accounts, I was an utter failure... but then, what if I did?

I believe in my heart of hearts, that when all is said and done, and this life is over, that we will all be greatly astounded at how many things we had working against us. Physical, emotional, psychological, economical, social factors all fighting for their right to be troublesome against us everyday. In general, do good. If you've made mistakes fix them, make goals, press forward, pray hard, love hard, live life to the fullest... when you can.

But when days come when you're not good enough (as they undoubtedly will), when doing your best means that you open your eyes just ONCE and look upward to the ceiling and mumble, "I am not enough today, make it OK, please!" When that has happened, and your inability to be effective in the world that day has been swallowed up in the love of Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, pull together all that you have and ask, "Lord, how is it done?" (Enos 1:7). And then when you have heard him say, "Because of thy faith in Christ…wherefore, go to, thy faith hath made thee whole" (Enos 1:8) go to, and do good, and keep fighting, keep praying, keep loving against odds, and hoping against hope-- and never forget that "because of the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, [you] may hope and be assured that the ending of the book of [your life] will exceed [your] grandest expectations." (Dieter F. Uchtdorf, “The Infinite Power of Hope,” Ensign, Nov 2008, 21–24)

Stop judging yourself and others. Trust that God loves everyone, and that everything will turn out, because it will.