Girl Matters

Awhile ago, I was at a retreat and received some prayer from a Pastor who was gifted in the area of prayer. I was expecting a huge revelation from God and maybe even to find some much needed direction for my life as I received prayer. However, the one thing that this Pastor prayed for me was to know that God loved me. His exact words were - "Lord, she just needs to know that you love her." My expected "burning bush" experience turned out to be one of the most simplest, yet profound truths that has become the bedrock for my relationship with God.

Why has knowing that God loves me changed my life? As women, I believe that we tend to look for love in all the wrong places. We long for someone to prove to us that we are worthy to be loved. This may explain our preoccupation with waiting for our proverbial knights in shining armor. Our search leads us to all sorts of dead ends. The top three dead ends which I am all too familiar with are: expecting someone else to quantify your value, expecting your performance to prove your worth and hiding behind perfection or titles in the hopes that it will cover up any flaws that reveal who you really are. Let me break it down even further:

Looking to others: Think about what we long to receive from the people that we are close to in our lives. Is it yearning to hear your father tell you that he is proud of you? Or perhaps it is having someone tell you that you are beautiful, lovable and worthy to be cherished. The dead end in this alley is that as long as we depend on others to tell us who we are and what sort of value we have, we will forever be enslaved to a faulty and temporary standard.

Performance: Does the thought of failing cause you to break out in a cold sweat? If we make our competence the standard of our worth, then what happens when we fail? The problem with finding our worth in how well we perform is that there is no end to the cycle. When is it ever enough? Often those who follow this dead end, find that their relationships suffer and that they are unable to shut off their need to produce something.

Perfection & Titles: There's nothing that will distract people from seeing the real you, when you have something as important as a position/title to hide behind. The particular identifying markers of that position become your own identity and it becomes so easy to let that be the source of your worth. The danger of course is that it becomes so easy to deceive yourself that you are not in need of God or others and this in turn allows you to very easily court sin in your life. In the end, you're pretty much living a lie!

There's obviously more when it comes to the many ways we tend to find our value in all the wrong things. What I am discovering as I reverse out of the dead ends that I've often found myself painfully stuck in, is that I need to reorient how I view myself and how I understand my worth entirely around the authoritative truth of God's Word. This is when we can really learn from having that childlike heart and join in that simple childhood song that we are so quick to forget: "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so..."