We’ve finally come to part three of my series on Self Care, Self Love and Self Worth. After these last few weeks of dedicating stolen thoughts and deep personal reflection to these subjects, I can say with confidence that while I’m no more of an authority on them than I was before, I’ve at least sat with them for enough time to hold each one with more respect and weight than I did previously. In fact, I spoke with my therapist last week about some things that had stirred me emotionally and I was struggling to put words to the feelings the encounter evoked. She encouraged me that journaling may help me to identify how events and encounters make me feel (yes, she prefaced the entire conversation with the classically age-old therapist question “How did that make you feel?”). Turns out I’m learning that I’m not very good at sitting with my feelings (this is a quality of my type 3 enneagram personality). On her prompting and in conjunction with my own existing love for engaging with people, journaling and blogging have allowed me to tap deeply into thoughts, feelings, emotions and concepts that I otherwise stow away and open up the conversation to others who may also wrestle with the same thoughts. It’s been a true growth exercise for me to not just use the words self care, self love and self worth, but to try to more fully understand them in these last several weeks.
Have you ever struggled to see your self worth? Perhaps you’ve been trying to frame up your worth through the lens of your vocation, or your place in your family or peer group. Maybe it has been measured by a performance metric that you or someone else has created (How many likes did your last post get? How much money do you make? How much do you feel respected in your home/workplace?). Regardless of how you measure your worth, there’s a much more important metric I know I too often forget, so I’d venture to guess others forget it as well.
You were worth the death of a man.
It seems quite costly, to consider life for life. It is. I knew prior to any reflection on this topic that I would be spending most of my efforts in the writing of this post wrapping my own head around the facts that I have known since Sunday school days but still struggle to truly internalize.
Worth the death of another human.
Maybe it’s because Jesus lived so long ago, and his life seems so far away from ours today that this notion can (devastatingly) seem minimized. But think of it in today’s terms. Consider that a person must die so that you may live (I don’t know, maybe this concept is easier to wrap your head around if you’ve been the recipient of a donor organ). But different than an organ donor, nothing was wrong with Jesus. He wasn’t making one final attempt to help another person on his deathbed. He wasn’t a good person out to do a good deed. He wasn’t even doing it so that he could leave a nice legacy. He laid down His life so that you and I could have ours, and furthermore, so that we could be with Him again someday for all of eternity. Because to Him, without question, you are worth that. You are worth all of that. And so am I.
Did you know that even if you were the only person on the face of the Earth, Jesus still would have died to save you? I’m being serious. I’m not painting an exaggerated picture for you; we were just created by an extravagant God who would go to any length to be with us. Including the necessary death of his own, only son. When we think of Jesus dying for all of mankind, I think that picture is a little big and sometimes it’s difficult to see the trees through the forest. But you, little tree, are a part of that. We are each inscribed on the palm of his hand and with those nails that held him to the cross our worth was established once and for all; and He called us priceless.
So, yeah, bearing that in mind, I’d say your self-worth should be pretty high on whatever scale measures that sort of thing. Like, off-the-charts, high.
But even still, we live in this world; this world where other people value us too. If it were as simple as carrying the worth we have from our Heavenly Father into our human lives everywhere we go, topics like understanding and appreciating our self-worth would have no place in a blog post like this. You work at a job where a value has been placed on your work (you are worth $____ per year to your company). You are a mom who juggles a seemingly endless to-do list and everyone else’s success hinges on whether of not you’ve set them up for it (you are worth the __ loads of laundry, __ meals cooked, __ boo-boo’s bandaged and __ tears wiped this week). You are that friend everyone comes to when they need advice on the topic you’ve seemingly become the resident expert on (you are worth the knowledge you possess and how it can benefit others).
See how it seems impossible to escape the rat race of measuring our self-worth against false idols of value instead of our true value as given to us by Christ himself?
We live in this world, but we don’t have to be of this world. Meaning, in this context, we don’t have to derive our value from the things this world says make us valuable.
You work for a living. Don’t let your paycheck turn into a balance sheet of your worth.
You do the tasks before you. They don’t define who you are.
You are a friend. Be whatever friend others need you to be (but draw boundaries that are healthy and equally life-giving).
I leave you with this: Who am I in Christ?
-I am a new creation of infinite worth.
-I am deeply loved, completely forgiven, fully pleasing and totally accepted by God.
-I am absolutely complete in Christ.
Be confident in your self-worth. It was given to you by the ultimate authority in your life, so you know it is trustworthy. You are more precious than rubies (Proverbs 3:15).