Over a decade ago, Brené Brown’s therapist suggested to her that most people are doing the best they can with the tools that they have. Given Brené’s experience of people being… people, she immediately disagreed with her therapist. But then, in true Brené Brown fashion, she started a research project, asking others if they believed people are doing the best they can with the tools they have. Brené noticed that those who agreed with her therapist – that people are generally doing the best they can – were a bit hesitant and qualified in their affirmation. But then there were the others. 

Those who believe that people are not doing the best they can were unequivocal and passionate in their responses. I never once heard, “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.” It was always some version of an emphatic ‘No! Absolutely not! No way!’ Unlike their “yes” counterparts, about 80 percent of these respondents used themselves as an example: “I know I’m not doing my best, so why should I assume others are?” (Rising Strong, pp. 110-111) 

Brené categorized the “no way” group as the perfectionist types. The “I think people probably are doing the best they can” folks, on the other hand, were the wholehearted types: “people who are willing to be vulnerable and who believe in their self-worth.”

Brené’s husband, Steve, fell into the latter category. When she asked him whether he thought people are doing the best they can, he said, “I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be” (p. 113).

There’s a part of me that loves this assumption that we are all doing the best we can with the tools or resources we have and believes it to be true. Hidden within that assumption (for me, at least), is the assessment that doing one’s best is what matters most, and is perhaps even… sufficient. “All you can do is all you can do,” my dad would say when I was in high school and stressed about homework. “And all you can do is enough.” Or, as Mister Rogers said: “Some days, doing ‘the best we can’ may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front – and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”

Isn’t this what we long to hear? That we’re doing our best (and that’s all that is expected)? That we’re doing a good (enough) job? That we’re doing hard things (as well as we can)? I often remember the conversation I had with a hospital chaplain the morning after my first husband died. I was 23 years old and completely disoriented by this sudden loss. He said, “Heidi, I know you’re going to be okay. Do you know why? Because when I met you in the waiting room right after the accident on Friday, I asked if there was anything you needed, and you said you needed a toothbrush and toothpaste. You know how to ask for what you need. So, you’re going to be okay.” Essentially, he told me I was doing a good job and that evaluation was just what I needed to hear that morning.

How often haven’t I extended this kind of appraisal to the patients, families, and students I care for? You’re doing a good job in an impossibly hard time… You made the best decision you could with the information you had… You’re doing your best. How often haven’t I, at funerals, echoed the master’s words in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25) as if I were echoing what we believe Jesus’ words will be when he welcomes the dead into his arms: “Well done, good and faithful servant. (You have been trustworthy with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.) Enter the joy of your master.” In other words, you did the best you could with the resources you had. And that was enough.

So, yes, a part of me loves and believes we’re all just doing the best we can. But there’s another part of me that feels deeply unsatisfied with this sentiment – and it’s not just the part of me that knows that I (like the wicked and lazy servant in Matthew 25) am not always doing my best.

The sentiment is dissatisfying to me insofar as it is – by itself – reductive. To observe a person who is having a rough go or making questionable choices or hurting other people and to say that she is doing the best she can with the tools she has… this reduces her story in at least these four ways:

• SHE: She is reduced to an individual. 
• IS DOING: Her status is reduced to her effort, which leads to her productivity/output.
• THE BEST: The descriptive adjectives about her are reduced to the thin scale of Poor. Mediocre. Acceptable. Good. Better. Best. 
• SHE CAN: Her abilities for decision making and action are reduced to the present moment. 
• WITH THE RESOURCES SHE HAS: Her capacity is reduced to an economy of discernible havings or not havings. 

In Brené Brown fashion, I’ve been asking several friends what their thoughts are on this sentiment and one of them said that it sounds like a conversation stopper. Like the end of a therapy appointment or a pep talk– “Well, you’re doing the best you can with the resources you have.” Or the gracious stop we put to a conversation wherein we’re being particularly judgy or complain-y about another person– “Hey, you know what? He’s just doing the best he can with what he has.” 

Here is how I bring the two parts of myself together – the part that loves to be told or to tell others that we’re all just doing the best we can and the part that is dissatisfied with this mantra: I look at these words as a gateway – a gateway of what psychologist Carl Rogers calls unconditional positive regard. When I assume that I am doing my best and you are, too, that is not the end of the conversation or the work, but the beginning. When we enter the relational moment with unconditional positive regard for each other, we create a safe and brave space for both of us to explore everything else that’s happening on the other side of that gateway.

On the other side of the gateway of assuming the best, we are free to explore how we are living in an interconnected web of community (not just as individuals). We have space to simply be (not always to do). We can describe our activity (and our passivity!) with words like slow and spacious, tight and tender, strong and spent, afraid and aghast, dark and withdrawn, luminous and light, full and fuzzy. Our abilities are but one thread in a tapestry of capabilities, disabilities, and probabilities. And in this field on the other side of the gate, we may find that the economies of what we have and what we don’t have may just be beside the point entirely. 

I’ve been mulling this blog over for some time, and in these latter weeks of my mull, I read James K.A. Smith’s newest book, Make Your Home in this Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing. My readers will not be surprised that I commend it to you thoroughly, but for the purpose of these paragraphs, I invite you to follow in just a few of his footsteps. 

When you or someone you love is in a difficult place – a dark night of the soul or a shadowy valley of disorientation – go ahead and start with the assumption that you (or they) are doing the best y’all can, if you must and if that is helpful. But then find a way to make your home in that dark, where there may indeed be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Lean into the possibility – the probability even – that you or they have failed, but that the failure comes, as Smith writes, with a promise (p. 146). A promise that there is more to us and to our stories than meets the eye. That as human beings, we are “wondrous centers of consciousness” (p. 183).

“Sadly,” Smith writes, “in our everyday distraction governed by transactional economies, we settle for the surface of others. My commodified default is to imagine you are merely what you present. We fail to imagine the depth behind things, especially other people” (p. 184). The truth his book explores (and that brings the parts of myself together) is that we as humans in community are mysteries encountering mysteries, and that no matter what or how we are doing (good, better, best, horrible), no matter what we know or don’t know (or would do well to unknow), no matter the resources we have or don’t have, we use or don’t use, we are beloved. We are beloved.

And maybe, just maybe “we have to experience the utter failure of knowledge [or effort] in order to shake this modern prejudice [that we are what we know and achieve] and open our hands in the dark. Who knows? The risk, and possibility, is that someone reaches back” (p. 160).

This, my friends, is the gospel. The good news. And yes, I will even say, the best news.