Seen and Worthy

“Remember, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong… to be welcomed… to know that you are seen and worthy.”

Rachel Macy Stafford

I spent some of the best years of my life in a tenth grade class, trying to teach tenth graders to fall in love with not only God but the scriptures that teach us about his story. In each class there were the cool kids, the not-so-cool kids and the kids who defied a label. I loved them all to pieces. They taught me an amazing lesson that I’ve never forgotten. The “labels” that the rest of the community put on them never seemed to translate into lived experience. The cool kids whispered to me of their loneliness with the same frequency as the kids who actually LOOKED lonely. And they were lonely too. All of them - lonely. All of them - swore they did not fit in and no one loved them.

I learned from these confessions. I learned that it does not matter how much you are welcomed, or who invites you to belong - if you cannot accept the truth that you are seen and worthy, there is not enough belonging and welcoming in the world that will make it feel true.

Yes, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong and be welcomed and to know that we are seen and worthy. BUT THIS IS AN INSIDE JOB. No one can “give” us this, we have to accept it. We must accept our inherent worthiness and then we must live into it.

This acceptance will be hard fought and will necessarily require that we beat back our insecurities and our perceived victimhood. It will feel unnatural. Unless I had the most amazing run of years of having uniquely lonely kids in my class, which I do not think is possible, this acceptance and belonging that we long for is not something we just take to like a duck to water when it presents itself.

Instead of asking the world to prove to us our worthiness, what if we began today, right now, with a commitment to the belief that we (and everyone else) are inherently worthy? We do belong. We are welcome. Sometimes we have to believe it before there is evidence to support our audacious belief. But the belief aligns with the story of God and I like our odds that it will ultimately prove true.

In December 1954 a committee that the state of North Carolina should find the way to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional. By the late summer of 1957 ONLY a dozen children of color were enrolled in traditionally white schools. In 1961 the number had increased to 200 children in 11 districts. It was a slow start, but the ball was rolling. I want to know how those dozen children felt. I want to know what it was like for the first 200 to blaze a trail. Most of all, I hope they knew that they were inherently worthy. For those kids and for us, even those of us who have never had to experience that kind of exclusion - we all struggle to feel worthy. How can we make this a little easier for one another?

A Prayer For When It’s Too Much…

Some days are just TOO MUCH! Too much arguing, too much paranoia and suspicion, too many labels and judgments. TOO MUCH! When those days hit me full in the face, I often grow withdrawn and silent. Prayer seems like a thing other people do. When this happens to me, I turn to the scriptures. Inevitably I find a passage that matches my state of mind. If the pandemic and political unrest feel like TOO MUCH - here is a psalm that soothes me into prayer. It reminds me that God is listening even if he is silent. God has habits I can count on - inevitable, true things about God - that I can trust in, even if I lose trust in everything else. Let us pray...

Help, God—I’ve hit rock bottom! Master, hear my cry for help!

Listen hard! Open your ears! Listen to my cries for mercy.

If you, God, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance?

As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped.

I pray to God—my life a prayer—and wait for what he’ll say and do.

My life’s on the line before God, my Lord,waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.

O Israel, wait and watch for God— with God’s arrival comes love, with God’s arrival comes generous redemption.

No doubt about it—he’ll redeem Israel, buy back Israel from captivity to sin.

Psalm 130, The Message