Fear has a way of taking the obvious and taking what’s true, and tweaking it just enough to make the careful mountain avalanche.
I started counseling recently, because, like most of us, I’m a mess of problems. Lew, my counselor, explained something to me. When God sees me, he sees Jesus.
Look, I went to seminary—I know this already. But for some reason I still struggle with it.
It’s like my head and heart are misaligned here.
For some reason in my heart, my value is based on how well I perform. And when I’m in a situation that’s stacked against me, where I cannot, by definition, win, then my value plummets. At least, how I perceive my value does.
Do you know what happens when a person’s sees their value as being very low?
Not much.
That’s how it is for me. And that’s what I’ve seen in others. All the potential, all the dreams, all the loved ones, they fade away into a vanilla nothing.
And in its own private way, that’s sad.
The truth is, God says he designed us both uniquely and perfectly (Psalm 139). That doesn’t mean we’re created to live on auto-pilot or that we never mess up. But it does mean we’re created by and for the Most Perfect One.
In my mind, the implications of this are never-ending.
God specifically created me.
And you.
And each of my kids.
And that mustachio who just cut me off in morning traffic. Because, I don’t know what his problem is, but the rest of us are all sitting here bumper-to-bumper because we like it.
Okay, that’s a digression. What I’m trying to say is we all have the same value. Our value isn’t dependent on our performance.
The whole point is, we were created by a Good Father. His greatest desire for us is freedom. When life’s bad, he wants us to lean on him, because that’s how we’ll make it. And when life’s good, he wants us to celebrate with him.
The opposite of all this is doing nothing–that’s the flawed process: when you play it so safe you’re your own quarantine. Fear’ll do that to us.
If we let it.
This post is a part of a new series on Conquering Fear.
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