What Are You Worth?

Worthy –

1 : having worth or value: estimable, honorable, meritorious
2 : having sufficient worth or importance

Synonyms: admirable, deserving, excellent, laudable, noble, true, valuable, respectable, satisfying, good.

Life circumstances, usually occurring in childhood, influence our perceived self worth. We come to believe and accept certain things about ourselves. These become our core beliefs. Core beliefs are beliefs that help us define who we are and how we fit into the world around us. Along the way, we can adopt negative or unbalanced core beliefs.

Some commonly held negative core beliefs are:

I am unworthy

I am unlovable

I am unsafe

I don’t belong

I am wrong

I am defective

Then we react, make decisions and interact with people based on these negative core beliefs.

Since January of 2014 I have been on an inner healing journey. The excavation process has been long and hard. Like an archeologist, I have been digging, brushing, picking and chipping away to unearth the negative core beliefs I’d come to accept. In order for me to walk in the liberty that Christ has offered me, I MUST unshackle beliefs that do not align with His truth.

I have come a long way over the last two years but as I saw from an incident recently there is still work to do.

I was completing the registry for my 6^th baby. In my heart of hearts I desired to have a new car seat and stroller for the baby. All of my children after the first had been using the hand-me-downs from my other children or from the bounty that is shared among my women’s group at church. And realistically, I would have to get a new one anyway because many of the old car seats have long passed their expiration dates and I’d recently gotten rid of the ones I had here at home. But when it came time to put it on the registry, the negative self-talk arose.

“You don’t deserve it.”

“You ingrate, just accept a hand-me-down one.”

“No one will buy you one.”

“You expect people to pay all this money for this? You made this baby. It’s your responsibility.”

This was and is still a difficulty thing to address, as the emotions are very raw. In fact, I want to backspace and delete this illustration but God is also working with me on vulnerability so I’ll leave it be. I write what He tells me to write.

And certainly I would accept hand-me-downs. I’m queen frugal fanny and know how to thrift, consignment and overall how to make a dollar out of fifteen cents so going used is a regular for me. But for this one request, this one need, I had a desire and wouldn’t even give myself permission to dare to dream that I was worthy to receive the gift. And surely I could have purchased it for myself and done away with this whole emotional battle but I know God is working on something in me, something that needs to be excavated.

Surely His is working on something in me because it came up again in another issue with a subject I’ve been called to teach on. With that came feelings of being unworthy and unqualified to teach on the subject because I feel it’s an area that I do have plenty of practice but seem to fall short from time to time.

What’s the deal with this convoluted thinking?

Yet another device of Satan. He is adept at whispering lies that sound very much like the truth. He is skilled as contorting and twisting innocent, pure desires of the heart. And if left unchecked he will write a whole screenplay full of lies and we’ll rehearse the lines over and over again then masterfully act out the play in our everyday lives.