Unworthy, not worthless
If you couldn’t tell from previous posts, I’m in the grueling process of rethinking my theology. I’ve learned that there are some life events that are meant to shape your faith, and others that reshape it. This is one of those reshaping times. If the average person lives roughly 70 or 80 years, I suspect this sort of thing is expected to happen several times.
I remember listening to a sermon in college that compared our worth to used tampons. But it was the imagery in that statement that disturbed me, not the implications behind it. For people who grow up Christian, maybe the idea of being unworthy of God’s love is accepted without much difficulty. I think the only reason I accepted that theology so readily was because my own sense of self-worth was practically non-existent: being in an abusive relationship for five years taught me worthlessness. I was forced to walk several steps behind him in public so people wouldn’t suspect we were together. You can imagine what that did to my self-esteem.
Even today, I’m amazed sometimes that I got married at all. I remember how much it blew my mind that my now-husband was so eager to hold my hand in public. I had never experienced that before. The idea of someone wanting to be with me, and even flaunting it, was baffling (but in a good way).
It’s no surprise, then, that I viewed God as viewing me with nothing but contempt and disapproval. If I screwed up somehow, I told myself I didn’t deserve good things to happen to me. After all, tampons that have been used no longer have value, and just get tossed in the trash.
Since this week is Holy Week, I’m rereading one of my favorite Easter devotionals – it’s the kind that tells me different things each time I read it, and Dale Fincher’s passage on unworthiness versus worthlessness is particularly relevant:
“’Unworthy’” is failing to live up to requirements. If you cheat your employer, you do not deserve a raise. If you don’t study for a test, you don’t deserve a good grade. If you come in last in the Boston Marathon, you do not deserve to win. But worth is about our value. Your merits can fall short, but you can still have value.”
I needed that reminder this week. For all my current doubts about what really happens when we die, what prayer is really for, and whether the Bible is truly inerrant, I needed to be reminded that Jesus was an underdog who came for the underdogs.
I’ll be honest – there are some things about Christianity that I never thought twice about before, which I now find contemptible. I struggle to reconcile those unsavory things with the goodness of the Jesus I have come to know. I want to understand, rather than discard the pieces of my faith that don’t make sense to me. I suspect this is something I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure out. But I don’t need to have everything figured out today. For now, I am going to contemplate what it means to have inherent worth and value not for what I do, but for who I was made to be.
Filed under: Religion Tagged: Christian culture, Christianity, depression, evangelicals, grief, hell
