This I Believe

A few months ago I realized that two desires are at the root of my being, and I have never wavered from them and as I have wavered from almost everything else at one time or another. The first desire is to feel valuable, that I have a purpose and am special. The other desire is the desire to have a lover. I realized tonight that these two things translate into this: I desire to be valuable, and to find another person valuable. Where do these desires come from? At first I thought that my desire to know that I am valuable was so that I knew I deserved and could obtain a lover. Then I thought, that seems pretty shallow in comparison to the opposite: that I want a lover so that I can feel that I am valuable. This evening I finally concluded that the system works itself out in a clever, cyclic way that makes both of these be true. Do you care to enter the cycle?

A question that I posed to myself recently is why should I love Jesus? Sometimes he seems quite caustic to certain people and quite ambiguous in his sayings. It is hard to like a guy like this. So I asked myself, well, why should one love a lover? What is the purpose and what do I gain by turning my face to another person and choosing to stay by their side?

I happened to put together the thoughts from the two paragraphs above and I found an answer to my questions. My desire to feel valuable is satisfied when someone shows me I am valuable to them. How valuable? If it is valuable enough to die for me, that makes me at least as valuable as them. But then we ask, how valuable are they? Quite valuable to us because they have just given us our value.

I had a talk with my one and only x-girlfriend the other night and realized that the reason that loving someone is so hard is because it forces us to make a decision of who is more valuable, me or her. In those times when you are in an argument, it is tempting to try and prove that you are the better lover, or deserve love more than the other, or to show that something is not your fault. The reason that we are so afraid of admitting we are wrong, or loving them more than ourselves, is that we are not assured of our worth. The earthly model of this makes this a danger. We are uncertain that our partner will fully return our love, and therefore our worth with it, so we hold back from fully putting our worth in their hands.

Tonight I saw the silhouette of pine trees in front of a dark, pink sky as I walked and I marveled at how beautiful it was. I wondered, “what is our purpose here, on this earth?” Then I thought, perhaps it is a gift from God. He is saying to us, “here is something to show you how much I love you, and thus how valuable you are.” I had also asked myself the nature of praise. Why do we praise an almighty God? Does he enjoy it? Is he insecure about his worth? I don’t know but it shows him how much we think he is worth, just like we desire to please a lover with a love song, and he does the same for us, by giving us Earth and His life.

Why do we desire worth? This seems like a stupid, obvious question, but I think the nature of hell can be found within it. If we are worth something, then that means we, and life, have not been wasted. Some choose to believe that we are a waste, and others choose to believe that we are not. It is a fairly arbitrary decision and you could go either way because we really don’t know if we are a waste or not. But those who chose to give worth to (in other words, to love) the one that proved that they have worth by dying, enter a cyclic pattern of love, praise and worth. These people give worth to Jesus by loving him back, and give worth to themselves by believing that Jesus has put their worth above his own. Those who have chosen that life is a waste, must therefore believe that it is not worth the death of anybody very special and therefore they might as well go balls to the wall and just have fun on this earth because there is no other reason for which to live outside of their life- because it is a waste!