What is your worth?
When faced with this question, you likely wouldn’t throw out a dollar amount. You might even give the correct answer: “I’m priceless.”
So why don’t we live like we believe that? I have trouble embracing that truth sometimes too!
When I write and talk about self-worth and our views of ourselves, it’s because I’ve struggled with it and I know if we don’t properly value ourselves, we’re at great risk for be mistreated and facing lives of mediocrity. Neither of these things is meant for us!
We’d expect more for ourselves (demand it!) if we grasped our true value. I’ve been reading the book “Worth Living” by Mary DeMuth and boy howdy, does this author get me.
“We need to reevaluate our relationships, particularly the ones that continually undermine our worth…The voices of others are powerful and when words of unworthiness are spoken over us, it’s hard to believe otherwise.”
See? She gets it, right?
How about this:
“The lie: I deserve to be overlooked.”
I believed this for so long. Being overlooked is painful. It hurts. It has a sting that lasts like a scarring burn. As child and teen, I took piano lessons, nine years of them. At one of my first recitals at about age 9, I suffered a hurtful case of being overlooked. And what’s even worse, the situation occurred in public for all to witness.
At the end of the piano recital each year, our teacher would call forward students one by one and acknowledge their hard work with a certificate. Each student was recognized. As she went down the alphabetical list and quickly passed the “D’s”, my letter, I grew uncomfortable. Any second now, she’d call my name, right? But as the list of remaining students grew smaller and smaller, I could feel the embarrassment creep up my neck and cover my face. I’d been overlooked.
As soon as the ceremony ended, I skipped the punch and cookies and told my parents I needed to go home. They allowed me to go alone across the parking lot to our home across the street, where I promptly sobbed when I reached our yard. I felt forgotten. Forgettable.
Before then and definitely after, I believed there was nothing special about me, nothing significant, and certainly nothing memorable. I was bland, regular, vanilla, quiet, insignificant.
But as the book says: “God saw. He noticed. He CHOSE me.”
As that 9-year-old little girl sat on her porch sobbing with a deep ache, God was aching at the sight of his child suffering. That wasn’t the only time I felt like a speck, useless and ignored, not by far.
“The God who created the people who have rejected me has chosen me!” We’re chosen, friends. Chosen. Because we’re important and wanted.
This book has so many pearls like these and speaks to that little girl in me and all the places wounded by feelings of inadequacy and insignificance. For someone like me–and perhaps you–who has some places broken by lies about our self-worth, this book meets us in the battle. The author, Mary DeMuth, has been there in the trenches of a struggle of her own. To know that someone understands those feelings has been cleansing, healing, and validating.
You can find this book at this link and remember this: (from Worth Living: How God’s Wild Love for You Makes You Worthy):
Even when the past strangles you.
Even when nothing you do seems to matter.
Even when your story takes a violent turn.
You are living a life worth living.
Always…hope,
Mary DeMuth is a former church planter in France and the author of more than thirty books, including The Day I Met Jesus. A sought-after speaker and longtime blogger she has overcome (through Jesus’s healing) a difficult past to become an authentic example of what it means to live a brand-new story. She lives in Texas with her family. Learn more at www.marydemuth.com.
