Self Esteem

“For God so loved the world…” -John 3:16

There is a new public service announcement out. It features Mariska Hargitay who says “If you like you, everyone else will too.” One of my high school students went to the national motivational seminar in Knoxville last week and took home a message about not listening to anyone else’s viewpoint about ones’ self, especially if it is negative. My wife and I recently reminisced about how many of our own college days were absorbed by our own insecurities and how much more we could have accomplished if we had only felt less afraid about who we were. And how often have adult friends shared stories about how their own parents filled them with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy that still continue to plague them?

Out of this fertile ground of our insecurities and self-doubts sprung the self-esteem movement. It tried to reassure us that both you and I were okay. It spawned numerous seminars, books, and self-help classes to say nothing of the efforts at building self-esteem among our school-age population. From there, it just seemed to be a natural progression to eliminating the sources of negative self-esteem. Grades were suspect, tracking was denounced, testing was dethroned, and everyone was encouraged to think they could do anything they put into their minds to do. Never was heard a discouraging word and the skies were not cloudy all day.

Like any humanistic movement and lie, there lay a kernel of truth at the core. Yes, we are born into this world as a 7-pound bundle of fears. We bear a terrible burden that we were never intended to bear: free, moral autonomy. And because it is an impossible load to carry, we wrestle with very, real guilt along with all the cast off remnants of parental and societal failings. The insecurities we feel are quite real, and the most, deservedly so.

But there is no healing power in a blind mantra that keeps repeating, “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Those who actually come to believe that often morph into arrogant monsters that no one can live with. I find little in myself to love so how can I truly love myself? There is ultimately only one means of reconciling myself to myself, and that is to see myself as God sees me. He knows it all, the failings and the filth, and yet he places great value on me. He comes and deals with the moral guilt, buries it in the deepest sea, and adopts me as His son. I am worthy because He said so, and the price of my ransom was high.

Next to that, the love of friends and family pales by comparison in its redemptive power. But because we are God’s body in this world, we can be the instruments of communicating His grace; “God’s love with fingers and toes.” I have to have God’s love and forgiveness, but that which comes through human agency is powerfully reassuring as well. It takes the form of the good Samaritan who picks up my battered spirit and nurses it back to health, reflecting the grace of God at work in us all.

I say all this to encourage parents to love your children with all the love that God puts in you. Your arms are a welcome flesh and blood embodiment of God’s love, and I think He meant it to be that way. I knew no one in my life as a child who could extend that act of grace to me. Many of our parents never experienced it given to them. How many sons have gone off seeking the reassuring love of their mothers in the arms of strange women? How many daughters have sought the love of their fathers in the embrace of young men? Love your children. Not blindly, but purposely, redemptively, and passionately. It grounds the spirit of a child like nothing else.