Believing in the Worthiness of All

“A collective sense of worthiness could shake the world.”

Brené Brown

It could, but will it?

I do not mean to sound like a negative Nelly after feeling like a prickly pear just a few days ago, but there you have it. Will we ever collect enough sense of worthiness to shake us awake, much less shake the world?

I do not know.

But I do know two things, tops:

God, for whatever reason, chose us to be part of the shake up. This seems like such a crazy strategic plan, seeing as how courage so often fails us and we are so good at diminishing ourselves and others.

Thing two: God is moving. His pace may feel slow, but his word assures us that his plans will come to fruition. He wants a kingdom where the inherent worth of all is a given, not a cause for alarm or protest.

I’m settling into this idea that I am old enough that I may never see a world shaken by worthiness. But I refuse to abandon the plan. I don’t want to slow the pace down by my own actions. I am fully well aware that I am a small pea in a big pot of peas living on a tiny dot of the timeline of creation. But there is “thing one” and “thing two” to consider.

So for today, I choose to believe in the worthiness of all. And I am going to continue to feel alarmed when anyone’s worth is diminished and do my part to be a voice of dissent when worthiness is not valued for all and by all.

But first, I need a nap. Also something God does not frown on because he knows we are frail and mere mortals. We really do need a discussion with Him about why he feels so strongly that we can be a part of his kingdom coming work!

Breathe. Rest. Relax.

“You’ll never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

Unknown

There is inherent danger in believing our own press releases. We all have a way of crafting our stories, don’t we? We have ways of seeing the world and the circumstances that have come to define our sense of self.

If your story is one of feeling “less than”, I have a suggestion. Consider choosing a new adventure. I see the fly in the anointment that may have you questioning this logic. You, me and by the way - everyone else on this planet - has lived in unworthy, “less than” ways. This is a fact. We do not always live in accordance with our own values and core beliefs.

But this does not invalidate our inherent worth. So what to do about our past mistakes? Own them. Own them fully but not exclusively. Account fully for shortcomings without ignoring the rest of the story - we were doing the best we could even if our best was not great.

How can we do that? Well, we could try noticing our defensive posturing - however that looks. Some of us are pretty defensive, others of us are straight up aggressive, others take on too much responsibility and blame themselves for everything! All of it is ignoring God’s value of inherent worth.

Inherent worth allows us to forgive and ask for forgiveness. It enables us to own our mistakes. It qualifies us to recognize the mistakes of others without having to judge them for their humanity.

When we are anxious about something, when we fear that God is not paying attention to us and if he is, he doesn’t like what he sees...we run to idols. This is the history of humanity. There is no need to expect that we will be the exception. But what we can do is recognize and pay attention to our tendency to fail to see the big picture.

God has us and he has got this - this whole wide world in his hands. Breathe. Rest. Relax.

Self-Worth and Self-Care

“Rest is not idle, is not wasteful. Sometimes rest is the most productive thing you can do for body and soul.”

Erica Layne

People who know their worth recognize the value of self-care. They rest. They relax. They allow time for restoration. Those of us who do not KNOW this, are forced to either hop on the hamster wheel of trying to prove it to self and others or find some way to numb the pain that is associated with living a lie - that we are somehow lacking.

Devaluing or inflating ourselves is living a lie and lies are hard to maintain. It rubs against our nature. It flies in the face of who God says we are. It requires massive amounts of denial.

The world feels like a scary place; I get that. I know, oh how I know, the anxiety born of wanting to please and not offend others. But I also know this - trying to win someone’s approval when I refuse to approve of myself is a waste of time. It’ll never happen.

So today, rest up. And think about it - if you were a person of value and inherently worthy, what kind of person would you want to be?

Seen and Worthy

“Remember, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong… to be welcomed… to know that you are seen and worthy.”

Rachel Macy Stafford

I spent some of the best years of my life in a tenth grade class, trying to teach tenth graders to fall in love with not only God but the scriptures that teach us about his story. In each class there were the cool kids, the not-so-cool kids and the kids who defied a label. I loved them all to pieces. They taught me an amazing lesson that I’ve never forgotten. The “labels” that the rest of the community put on them never seemed to translate into lived experience. The cool kids whispered to me of their loneliness with the same frequency as the kids who actually LOOKED lonely. And they were lonely too. All of them - lonely. All of them - swore they did not fit in and no one loved them.

I learned from these confessions. I learned that it does not matter how much you are welcomed, or who invites you to belong - if you cannot accept the truth that you are seen and worthy, there is not enough belonging and welcoming in the world that will make it feel true.

Yes, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong and be welcomed and to know that we are seen and worthy. BUT THIS IS AN INSIDE JOB. No one can “give” us this, we have to accept it. We must accept our inherent worthiness and then we must live into it.

This acceptance will be hard fought and will necessarily require that we beat back our insecurities and our perceived victimhood. It will feel unnatural. Unless I had the most amazing run of years of having uniquely lonely kids in my class, which I do not think is possible, this acceptance and belonging that we long for is not something we just take to like a duck to water when it presents itself.

Instead of asking the world to prove to us our worthiness, what if we began today, right now, with a commitment to the belief that we (and everyone else) are inherently worthy? We do belong. We are welcome. Sometimes we have to believe it before there is evidence to support our audacious belief. But the belief aligns with the story of God and I like our odds that it will ultimately prove true.

In December 1954 a committee that the state of North Carolina should find the way to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional. By the late summer of 1957 ONLY a dozen children of color were enrolled in traditionally white schools. In 1961 the number had increased to 200 children in 11 districts. It was a slow start, but the ball was rolling. I want to know how those dozen children felt. I want to know what it was like for the first 200 to blaze a trail. Most of all, I hope they knew that they were inherently worthy. For those kids and for us, even those of us who have never had to experience that kind of exclusion - we all struggle to feel worthy. How can we make this a little easier for one another?

Combatting Feelings of Unworthiness

Note to self: Quit holding on to your unworthiness. It may be familiar, but it’s not a friend. You were worthy from the day you were born, and nothing you do will ever take that away. So welcome your worthiness IN. Erica Layne

I had a friend who got into the habit of lamenting her poor parenting skills. We, her friends, got into the habit of reassuring her of her parenting prowess. The more we affirmed, the louder she berated herself. After a while, it was annoying to listen to her constant put downs.

Finally, we performed an intervention. We decided to agree with her and see what happened. If I had understood the concept of ambivalence and how that relates to change, I would have understood the situation better. None of us knew about this principle, but we somehow managed to stumble into the cure.

We were hanging out at the park and our kids were running around while we sat on blankets, happy for a warm sunny spring day. She began her lament. We started responding like this: “Wow. You know, that does sound pretty bad.” Or, “Gosh, maybe you need to get some support to help you improve your parenting skills.”

Stunned, she began to defend herself!!! After several rounds of this rodeo, she realized what was happening and she had a real moment of clarity. “Wait a second! I’m defending my parenting all of a sudden!” Yes she was.

So we told her our perspective. We talked about how tiring it was to constantly act as her booster rocket to launch her out of her parental despair. We asked her to consider two things: 1. Give up the habit of self-recrimination or 2. If you think you are that bad, get help to change.

To her credit, she did both. It was a hard habit to break, but she did it. She has raised four amazing children. But I sometimes wonder when I reflect back on those days of young motherhood - where would she have ended up if she had not been willing to accept that she was worthy of being the kind of parent she aspired to become?

What familiar old messages of unworthiness do you need to release or address?