How to develop a healthy self-worth

Discover your worth !

Self worth is not a thing, it is a perception.
Just as a gymnast begins a routine with ten points and receives deductions for each mistake, so you began your life with a natural, complete sense of self-worth. Have you ever met an infant with self-worth issues ? This should be another reason to follow Jesus´command of becoming like children.

But as you grow up, you serve your own judge, deducting points when you misunderstand the nature of living and learning. When you forget that you are a human in training and that making mistakes and having slips of integrity and mediocre moments are a part of life and not unforgiveable sins.

We may have a difficulty with this, because all of us are only too conscious of our many failings and feel we do not have a right to God´s kindness toward us. But that is precisely what makes God´s love so beautiful. It does not spring from the goodness he sees in us, but from the overflowing goodness of His own love and the compassion.

In order to develop a healthy self-worth we have to recognize the need for God in our lives, and placing ourselves in His hands with complete trust, confident of the tenderness of our Father´s love for us.

And the next time you feel that something good can´t last, remind yourself that evolution moves in an upward spiral and that life can, and usually does get better over time. You live and learn, stumble and fall, rise and fall. If you pay attention and develop a good relationship with God you become stronger, clearer, wiser and move up.

Life is a process of rediscovering your worth and the worth of all of God´s children.

The key is to remember that even though we don´t feel very kind, or brave, or even deserving, the roof over our head continues to shelter us from storms, the sun shines upon us even when it´s cloudy, our chairs keep supporting us, and so does God. That is in essence the Grace of God which is found in Jesus Christ.

The following poem is an excerpt from a sermon from Martin Luther King Jr. and expresses the worth of everything in God´s creation:

If you can´t be the highway,
just be the trail.
If you can´t be the sun,
be a star.

´Cause it isn´t by size that you win or fail,
just be the best in whatever you are.