I am far too often the author of terribly poor decisions. Yet I must rest in the unalterable fact that God says I am far better than what the sum total of those decisions would ever suggest.

The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.

When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?

Sometimes the most mature words that we can say are “I don’t know.” For it is not knowledge that evidences my worth. Rather, it’s the knowledge that an honest man is worth a thousand who are not.

We want to know that our worth is not altogether lost in the vastness of our obscurity. And I find it of tremendous comfort to remember that Christmas was the greatest Being in all of existence being born into the greatest obscurity ever imagined in order to declare that with God, there is no such thing.

Do not be ashamed of who you are, for in doing so you are not taking into account the majesty of all that you are. And without any shred of doubt I know that you are a person of majesty, for in my innumerable years of working with people I have yet to find even one person who is not.

Look in the mirror. Go ahead and look yet again. And look not at the reflection, for while this body of yours is marvelously complex in ways that continue to elude the reach of modern science, it is but a simple shell that holds the image of God within you. And if the shell is that grand, how much more what God has placed inside of it.

I am not the sum total of my accomplishments, for no matter how much I exhaust myself acquiring those accomplishments, the sum total of them will always be far too trifling to ever reflect my true value. My value rests in the fact that I am an accomplishment of God so incalculably valuable that He gave up Himself rather than give me up.

When our lives lay in scorched shambles, we cannot allow our lives to take on the identity of the carnage that lies smoldering all around us. Therefore, we must create something that irrefutably declares we are not what lies strewn at our feet. And so, we create successes that declare we are not this! Yet, the carnage remains.