I read about a high school classmate’s successes the other day. It only took a few minutes—and yeah, a few Google searches—before the deprecating voices crept in.
This guy? He’s got his doctorate. He’s teaching and writing and researching and influencing how many scores of people in his field. And what am I doing?
It’s that last question that takes me down a really unhelpful and discouraging path. The path is littered with other questions, each rating my lack of measurable success and making me feel smaller and smaller. Where are the books you’ve planned to write? How about the children’s book you were going to photograph? The graduate degrees? The office with your title on the door? “Are you still unemployed?”
That last one wasn’t my own. I was on an insurance call not so long ago. It had been a really productive morning, I was cruising through life, getting it done left and right, and the question brought me to a screeching halt. “Are you still unemployed?” Well dang. Now that you say it… I guess so.
I let my self-worth, in that moment, be defined by the word “unemployed.” Three syllables of condemnation—to my ears, at least. I stopped and considered it and realized, Holy cow, I AM unemployed! My mind raced through all the ways I felt employed, thankyouverymuch. Sure, I take in a very small amount of money through my photography business at the moment. But money’s all we’re talking about here, right? If she had asked, “Do you work?” I could’ve explained the thousands of things I do on a daily basis and it would’ve added up to all kinds of labor the world sees as employable labor. I DO STUFF, lady. But what I really wanted to say was: I am worthwhile.
I had a conversation with a friend today where I learned how many birthday parties her kids go to each year. I can count on three fingers how many parties my child has been invited to in the last 12 months. I wasn’t grieved by the comparison because I know that my kiddo has a small friend set, but I paused internally and wondered if I should spend time being grieved by this. In the end, I think I’ve landed on a sweet understanding and it’s that birthday parties in grade school are equal to lines of resume earned by your 20th high school reunion. You can use these things to measure success, but—and this is a big but—you should not.
Friends matter. Degrees matter. Job titles and books and salaries actually do matter. But they are not ultimate things. They do not get to define a person. They are not what gives you value.
You are born valuable. Made in the image of an Almighty God, you are not worthy because of what you do, you are worthy because He made you. And He loves you. This love story has been around a long time, it was set in motion before the world began. It involves a Creator who is far more than a disinterested party somewhere in the universe. He made man special and he made man to be in relationship with him.
My takeaway is that I have a choice about how I spend my time. I want to put money and accolades in their rightful place. I want to use my gifts to serve the world around me—and sometimes that looks the way it looks today where I have this privilege to be UNEMPLOYED and yet not care because being unemployed does not define me. Whether I have three friends or fifteen, I want to love well. Whether I’ve written one blog post or five top-selling novels, I want to write well. Whether I volunteer for the PTO or for making church coffee, whether I am awesome at folding laundry or barely keeping us in clean clothes, whether I take my neighbor cookies or serve at the City Mission, I want to work with my whole heart. And I want to work from a place of worthiness; not because my work defines me, but because I am already safe and whole and loved by God.
**Blog title taken from the one of the most quotable movies ever, and one of only two VHS movies in our possession when we moved from Oregon to Nebraska in the summer before 7th grade. Do you know it?
