Have We Any Worth?
Why are all we satisfied with living lives less than our dreams? Were we not made for excellence, abundance? Where did we step out of our destiny? Why do we fail to claim our given birthright?
The answer to these is not ambiguous. FEAR! Fear holds us imprisoned in our thoughts of inadequacy. We accept less than we want because we name ourselves unworthy, incapable, broken, undeserving. We have ingested these ideas about ourselves for multiple years. We take our mistakes and label them failures, and character defects, instead of opportunities to move forward to success. One mistake can destroy our dreams. We carry our sins as weapons and criticisms that pierce our souls and destroy our hope. Perhaps, if we are Christ followers, we will deposit our sins to His account, often only temporarily; we will take them back, with additional weight because we know we should let them go. We kill our will to overcome obstacles by focusing on the times we fell short of expectations instead of celebrating the victories.
We love, we work to prove we care and love others, but turn the venom of fear-born hate upon ourselves. Sometimes we are our worst enemies. Part of Mark 12:31 states, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Often, we focus on “love your neighbor,” and completely disregard, “as yourself.” To be healthy and fully share our hearts we must be kind, respectful, generous, and loving toward ourselves. Not that we should become narcissistic or egotistical, but we need to understand that the person in the mirror has worth, just as does the child down the hall. Unfortunately, we can in our attitudes, thoughts, words, be unkind, even hateful to ourselves in ways we would never dare to treat anyone else.
When we live in the guilt, dishonor, disrespect, unkindness, hate, we often pour upon ourselves there is little room for us to claim the success for which we were created and that we so richly deserve. We denigrate ourselves to levels of impoverishment where we cannot achieve anything near the rewards our lives are capable of generating.
We must choose to recognize ourselves as worthy. Worthy of the beauty in which we exist, worthy of the accomplishment we are capable of building, worthy of the love we desire, worthy of exceeding the levels of happiness within which we live, worthy of fulfilling our dreams and having the life we wish.
This is a challenge, fear is rampant, only by realizing we can conquer can we dispel the enemy. We, with creativity, can break out of the shackles of fear and move into the lives we were designed to live. Write a plan, do not give up, make it happen. You are stronger than you recognize. Dragons may arise, but remember we are able as scribes to conquer dragons.
© Jo Ann J. A. Jordan
