I entered middle school with a shaky sense of self worth, ripe for the bullies who took my problem to a much more permanent level. Picked on incessantly, I’d go to bed each night worried about how the next day would go, with nobody to talk to, feeling worthless.

What was so wrong that attractive, popular people felt it important to ridicule me?

In my college years I took steroids, hit the gym every time the doors were open, joined a fraternity, and took crap from nobody. After graduation, I started a career in aviation, flying all over the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, bragging to anyone who would bend an ear.

Nobody would have guessed that I hated who I was. No matter how cool my friends, or how impressive my career, or shapely my physique, I couldn’t shake the sense that there was something fundamentally wrong.

I had no understanding of my need for self-reconciliation.

In my early 30’s I turned to religion. While it was helpful to be part of a community that tried to avoid disparaging others, my newly found beliefs seemed to add to the idea that I was “bad.” But I also stumbled into something that changed everything, and taught me a fundamental truth about what self-reconciliation looks like.

If you’re struggling here, and miss this step, you’ll miss the boat entirely.

I had just taken a flying job in a small East Texas town, bunking with a bunch of other pilots in an old rental house that took up half a city block. It was a blast, and super cheap; our landlord didn’t care much about money, she just wanted someone to take care of the place.

My pilot friends ultimately moved on, and I found myself the sole resident of the “Mansion,” as we called it, so I invited an acquaintance to move in – he and I alone in a 5 bedroom, 5 bath, very large, possibly haunted house. Though our new friendship got off to a rocky start (I wasn’t easy to get along with), in a few years we became lifelong friends.

There was something about him that I had never experienced in other friendships, something that dealt an unprecedented blow to my self-rejection problems. He was a well-respected leader in our church, so I gave him some authority. I trusted him. When he spoke, I listened. When he communicated positive things, I believed them.

He rarely had anything negative to say about me, and regularly spoke into areas where he saw unique abilities; places of strength that might be used to serve and influence others. He spoke truth, over and over again, into a heretofore self-deprecating life.

HIs friendship jammed the tape that had been looping in my head: “You’re a loser,” “Everyone else is better than you,” “You’ll always fail.” He introduced the idea that, maybe, I wasn’t so bad after all.

My friend wasn’t a professional therapist with years of experience, he was simply a fellow human being, someone I trusted, who believed that I was good, and convinced me of the same. It was the most massive assault on my low self-worth that I had ever experienced.

Self-Reconciliation: The Way out Is Like the Way in.

The internet is awash with advice and resources, compelling us to think positively about ourselves, get therapy, exercise, take walks in the sunshine, meditate, do good deeds, etc. Nobody would argue the merits of these, but they miss two important truths about self-rejection.

First, it came at the hands of another human. We’re not born with it. It’s given to us.

Psychology Today lists the seven most common causes of low self-worth, all related to do with a human perpetrator – trauma, neglect, bullying, authority figures gone bad, overbearing religious folk – humans who sent a clear message: “There’s something fundamentally wrong with you.”

It’s not intentional. Most of the time these people love us. But their failure to love themselves, by definition, ripples far beyond them, deep into the unmovable places of our soul. And because they are close to us, and because we’re young and/or impressionable, we give them authority. When they speak, we listen.

It’s an easy sell.

Second, and most importantly, because our problem came at the hands of a trusted human, self-reconciliation can only come from another human, one we trust at least as much as the people who hurt us.

A to-do list alone, without the help of such an ally, will fail.

The best chance we have of digging out from self-rejection is to find a friend, a strong one, somebody who can see past our weaknesses into our strengths; somebody who loves us and wants to see us win. But it will have to be someone who we’re willing to give authority to, like we did with the people who lied about who we are. We’ll have to look up to them, trust them, and listen to the many ways that they’ll communicate our worth.

Rest assured that the world is full of them. They hang out in churches, community service organizations, soup kitchens, broken places. They probably won’t be the prettiest, or the most popular, but In helping others, they’ll know what it means to hurt. Many have navigated their own self worth problems, mourning when they see it in others, more than willing to help us up. Find one of these people and walk with them for a few years. They’ll lay into your lies like nothing else.

The Gospel’s Lost Child

Theologically speaking, Jesus’ gospel should leave us with a deep sense of personal value. New Testament Christianity is the only religious system that gives us a set of rules, tells us we can’t follow them, then gets the rules out of the way so we can see ourselves as God does. As a result, all of humanity is placed on the same level; I’m not better than you, you’re not better than me. The valleys have been filled and the mountains razed to the ground. We’re now free and compelled to appreciate, love, and celebrate us, all of us, including ourselves.

Unconditionally.

It’s brilliant.

In the same vein, It’s the only religion that places forgiveness in the dead center of everything, which has huge implications for our temptation to reject ourselves. For those of us with the guts to apply it, forgiveness keeps us from breaking relationships, judging others, marginalizing, etc; all favored American pastimes that lend to self-rejection.

But we don’t typically pitch forgiveness, or any other aspect of Jesus’ gospel as something that has the power to change the way we think about ourselves. We tend to place the most emphasis on i) the reconciliation of humanity to God, and ii) the reconciliation of us to everyone else. The reconciliation of us to ourselves (iii) is too quickly relegated to the field of mental health – it’s not a spiritual thing, much less a priority for God’s people.

We get a bit squeamish at the intersection of faith and psychotherapy.

That might explain why so many of us are wandering zombie-like through our life with God, placing far too much emphasis on rules, and marginalizing people who don’t follow them.

We’ve too frequently done the same to ourselves.

Ironically, the more I reject myself, for whatever reason, the more I feel the need to reject others, and vice versa, which ultimately bears the fruit of broken relationships, isolation, and distance from the only thing that might bring healing.

Humanity

The gospel, in all of its acts, should bring us into an impossible level of reconciliation. But when we remove one of its fundamental parts, say, the reconciliation of us to God, or, as we’re seeing in today’s political arena, the reconciliation of us to each other, the whole thing unravels, as it does if I ignore the part that aims to reconcile me to myself.

We are right to emphasize the unconditional grace of God in His work on the cross, and we’d be fools to believe something so monumentally impossible and not extend the same forgiveness and weight to others. But, I would argue, ignoring the gospel’s third act will not only solidify the ill effects of self-rejection, it will always result in making the rest of the gospel nearly impossible to live out.

And it’s just plain bad theology.

Photo Credit: Danielle MacInnes