The other day I was minding my own business reading a Weird West genre novel when I was smacked upside the head with a series of thoughts that obsessed me for a good hour afterward.
One of the things you should know about me, and could probably easily glean from my past writings, is that I have issues with self esteem, value, worth, importance. I tend to consider myself a "bargain basement" human being average in just about every way. This causes...problems...issues. I struggle against it, rail against it, feel bad because I can't seem to defeat it, and most days do alright with it.
The main reason for my reticence to believe I am worth anything is because I'm acutely aware that there is little intrinsic value in an empirical sense. To a Christian or other spiritually minded person this seems ridiculous, but bear with me here. Also, bear with me because there are about 100 off-ramps on this stretch of mental highway and I can't promise I won't try a few...dozen.
My wife would tell me early on in our marriage, "You have worth for the simple fact that you exist at all." This has never made sense or sat right with me. I know it is a popular sentiment, but I could never seem to apply it to myself. Why? Because of the very transient, unreliable nature of the concept of worth, value, or importance.
When we say an object is valuable what does that mean? Is the object in and of itself valuable? How does it gain or lose value? Take diamonds for instance. They are easily one of the most common gemstones on the planet...but they are some of the most expensive pound for pound, even considering the lab created ones. Why? Because of marketing, popular opinion, and tradition. All of these confer value on to the object. It is not intrinsically valuable. Value is derived from the opinion of others, not something inherent in the object itself.
The concept of "Worth" is similar. How much an object is worth is entirely dependent on what someone will pay for it. Furthermore the "importance" of an action, object, event, or even a person changes over time due to the opinion of others.
All the concepts we have in our language for value, worth, and importance are based on the opinion of someone outside of us. And...that doesn't seem sustainable to me.
From birth we are conditioned to this. Our sense of self-worth rests quite a bit on the opinion of our parents. From there we enter the social arena on our own and much of how we feel about ourselves is dictated by the opinions of our peers, our bosses, our teachers. It is such a powerful opiate that there have been studies done that show our peers can change our minds for us with little effort because we want them to still think of us as valuable. We want to the group to like us so that we remain valuable, worthy, and important in their eyes so we can feel good.
Many of the great atrocities in the history of the world have come about because of this transient quality of value. We say, "Every life is sacred/precious", but that is little more than popular opinion. Opinions change. You can easily work out from here the atrocities that come about by basing the value of an individual on the opinions of others.
It doesn't take too much reading about celebrities and their lives to understand that this is a massive motivator for many of them. The belief is that if they make it and the maximum about of people like them then they have real value, they have obtained a permanent level of worth and importance. Well, it doesn't take long for many celebrities to be forgotten and disappear into obscurity. This often leads to substance abuse and sometimes suicide.
But, as I always think and probably have spouted on here, I come back to an old phrase I accidentally wrote in an unpublished novel, "No. Who are you really? When you are naked, alone, in a cave who are you then?" and now I'd add, "Where does your worth come from?" Is it what you have? Is it who you love? Is it what you do or have done? For our own mental sanity we need a source which doesn't change its opinion of us.
For the Christian...we do.
Through Jesus, each one of us is picked up, brushed off, and loved with a love that is incomparable. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that would eliminate or even reduce His love for us. We are not left to our own devices to be anxious over power, status, who loves us and how much. It's a pretty basic concept I'm only just plugging into, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that I over complicate things.
Pax,
W
