I see amongst my peers, and even in myself, a generation that is disappointed and losing hope. Rejection happens. We seem to fall short. People hurt us. Relationships aren’t what we expect them to be. Things don’t go the way we had hoped, or even planned.
And we take it upon ourselves to lose hope, to believe that we are the problem, to bury ourselves in our own inadequacy and inability to embody what they— whoever they may be— want.
The truth of the matter is that we will never be everything they want. We will never be able to please everyone. We will always face periods and events of rejection, we will always fall short of things every now and then because we can’t win everything.
And because these non-fulfillments, what we deem “failures” will always fall across our paths, it is very dangerous to align our worth with them. Can you imagine? Why would you equate your self-value with what the world deems “success” when “failure” is sure to come your way?
It took me a while to understand that my eternal enough-ness has nothing to do with how I fit into the world or how well I do in other people’s terms. And I’m still growing and letting go of the standards imposed on me which, the standards which I internalize and which come to squeeze my heart in all the wrong ways. It is difficult to accept yourself as enough when you grow up being told you are anything but by just about everything in our culture.
A friend showed me a video last fall which has impacted me greatly again and again in the months since, and which I think is really relevant regardless of what you see as the truth. Worshipper, musician and all-around superwoman Melissa Helser discusses the importance of taking care of our hearts, which are containers for God, being kind to our emotions and our disappointment, but not remaining stuck in them— because weakness may exist, but hopelessness does not.
Every single day I am impacted by the negativity and hopelessness which seems to persist around me. We are a broken people, I don’t think anybody will repudiate that. But we are also determined, and passionate, and persistent. I believe we have a God who strengthens and empowers us, who is good, who breathes through us a Spirit of rebirth and newness and hope.
In the video, Helser says that Jesus “gave us full permission to fall on our face,” to lament, to be disappointed, to weep. To feel. If the God of the Universe gave himself permission to feel, so can you. If the God of the Universe wept, and prayed for a another way, so can you.
Feel the sorrow, feel the disappointment, grieve— but “do not stay there.”
There is always hope. And at the core of this, we must also have hope in ourselves— confidence in our own pricelessness and the fact that nothing can change that pricelessness. Because if we don’t have confidence in that, if we believe that our worth is determined by external factors, we will end up being disappointed and heartbroken constantly. Every single day offers the opportunity to be knocked down, to be made less than, to call yourself names.
Are you going to do it?
Enough is enough. The world has messed up enough— humans killing humans, humans abusing humans, humans devaluing humans. We don’t need to continue the process by devaluing ourselves. It hurts me a lot when I do it to myself, and it hurts me when the people around me are doing it to themselves. Self-deprecation is unproductive, dehumanizing, and a recipe for hopelessness and destruction of your own heart.
Feel the things, but do not let them destroy your hope in the goodness of the future.