Know My Worth

Hello dear friends,

You don’t see me much these days as I’m back in school, and creative time is often taken up by discussion forums and reflection papers. I’m learning more skills to add to coaching; I’m working to become a therapist.

I recently wrote this simple post for class, and today I felt led to share my heart with you here.

Reflections on Worthiness

In 2011, based on my mother’s steps in her own life, I had an epiphany. My mom had decided to divorce, in spite of her firm beliefs about God’s law and wrongness of divorce.  When she made that decision, I felt a surge of freedom that comes with stepping into true grace.  The Holy Spirit whispered an insight to me that became the foundation of this blog and Facebook community: Nothing I do, nothing I’ve done, and nothing that has been done to me impacts my worth.

I knew, without a doubt, that God still loved my mother even though she was divorcing.  I knew that even though this event would create sorrow and difficulty, God would be there.  And in that experience, my mom may be able to hear him even more clearly than she ever had before in her life.  I knew that God would use this time to bring her close, not to judge or condemn her, but to truly show her what His love and grace could look like, and how comforting it could be.

Through this understanding about my mom, I realized that throughout my life, I’d been trying to prove myself worthy – worthy of relationships, worthy of successes, worthy of happiness, worthy of God’s love. Through my own efforts, my own attempts at being “good” I would somehow find peace and love. But that’s actually opposite to how the gift of grace works… the more we strive, the further away we get from just accepting the gift, from just accepting our inherent worth.

Even when we do things that seem “wrong,” God can use those errors to bring us closer to him.  When bad things happen to us in life, God can use those events to bring us closer to him.  Trauma can create depth.  Sinfulness can create true repentance.  Mistakes create understanding.   All of these “bad” or “wrong” things that we do in our lives are tools that God uses to help us understand his love, his grace, and his view of us through Christ, as worthy, beautiful, and beloved – just as we are, just as he created us, and just as he has always known we would be. We cannot become any more or any less worthy than we already are.

Thank you for being here with me on this journey of worth.  I will continue to post here from time to time as the Spirit leads. To connect a bit more often (2x mo), I hope you join my Worth & Wisdom newsletter.