You Are Desired

I love the Christmas hymn “O Holy Night” by Adolphe Adams. My favorite verse is, “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.” The incarnation is proclaiming to you and me that we matter to God. We bear God’s image. The fact Jesus became human affirms that all human lives matter, that we are all of inestimable worth. Even in the midst of our failings and faults and peculiarities, the you that is you, uniquely you, matters to God. You and I will never discover our true worth in the eyes of others—even those who love us the most in this life. It is only in the eyes of Jesus that we can discover our true worth.

Some homeowners in Sweden discovered a painting in their attic. It had been left by the previous homeowner, who had assumed the painting was not of any value. But the new homeowners suspected it might be an original painting by Vincent van Gogh. They brought it to Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum in 1991, but the curators there deemed it inauthentic because it lacked Van Gogh’s trademark signature. However, a few years later, art historians used new technologies to reexamine the painting. They could tell by examination that it followed the exact brushstrokes used by Van Gogh in his other paintings. Adding to their certainty, an 1888 letter from Vincent to his brother Theo described the painting in detail, and even mentioned the exact day he painted it. It is now on display in the museum.

When we dismiss an artist’s creation as worthless, we are in essence dismissing the artist’s creative process and heart in that creation. Do you ever realize you are hurting God, the Artist, when you dismiss or devalue the good creation he made in making you?

What makes the painting so valuable? It is an original Van Gogh. If they had not authenticated that it was painted by Van Gogh, it would not be so valuable. You and I are original works of God. We were divinely designed and created by a masterful Artist. We are all originals, and this is why we are so desirable. Each of us carries within us our own originality. As our lives unfold, we begin to see more and more how uniquely each of us has been designed. God has a divine reverence for our radical originality. This is why it is so painful to God when we devalue ourselves.

Jesus longs for us to repent of the sin of finding our worth as defined by the world. Jesus died and rose to establish our new life, our true life, that has been hidden in him from the beginning. To be hidden in Christ (Colossians 3:3) is to be taken out of this world that has drugged our original selves with cheap satisfactions. To be hidden in Christ is to live in the penetrating light of his original life. Our originality, transformed in Christ, is the deepest originality we can live into. Discovering our original selves in the light of Jesus is far better than being lost in the masses trying to establish worth in what we have, how we look, or what we accomplish. Christ in me is the emergence of my original self that is from eternity in him.

I feel the pull to find my validation, my desirability, in the world I live in every day. But I have learned it can never be found there. And I have come to believe that attempting to establish my worth in this world is not only being unfaithful to God, but is actually being disloyal to myself.

Nonetheless, God is forever faithful to us, forever loyal to us. God is loyal to our spiritual identity that he created out of love. Before you existed, God loved you. It was the love of God that brought you into being. For our part, we can reject it and often do. In so doing, we are rejecting our unique selves that came into existence without our asking for it or deserving it.

Are you saying yes to your soul as the unique, valuable gift of God’s creation, or adopting the narrative of the world that establishes your worth apart from God?

What will you do with this gift, with the unique gift-that-you-are? God longs that your loyalty to your soul be as great as God’s loyalty is to you. God does not force you to do so—you can reject your true worth and neglect your sacred value. God does not coerce you into saying yes to your soul. God instead waits for your answer with infinite compassion and gentleness and patience. How you answer will determine whether you are living your one true life, or one constructed from the narratives of your world. If you fail to live into your true spiritual identity, into the gift-you-are, you will suffer a sickness of soul. Your soul cannot endure the constant striving to establish your worth in any way other than in God.

What is at stake in all of this? Does it matter if we know and believe that we are a divinely designed gift? What will be lost if we do not understand that we have a soul? What can be gained by an awareness that we have dazzling dimensions, preformed and predestined, that have and will shape the person we are and become? Why is it important to understand that we are not images of God, but are made in God’s image?

A great deal, it turns out. The single answer is this: if this is true, then we do not need to find our identity—our identity will find us. Our identity is given by God; we do not have to search for significance. Significance has found us, and living then becomes a process of discovering and living into that significance.

We do not need to seek validation. Validation, as they say, is for parking tickets. Your existence is your validation. You are, as Mark Nepo writes, “an invaluable, irreplaceable seed in the ground of existence, each of us a small miracle waiting to blossom in the large miracle.” But there are voices who will try to tell you that you are not enough—not smart enough, not beautiful enough, not talented enough. We live in a culture of rejection. The world around you will tell you that you cannot be loved, how you look is undesirable, and what you have is insufficient. Those voices, those assessments, are not telling the truth. The truth about you is this: you are a divinely designed gift.

To believe that we are divinely designed gifts should not lead us to narcissism but to doxology; it should not cause us to have pride, but should cause us to experience humility. We did nothing, after all, to merit or earn or deserve it. God chose to create each of us with aptitudes and talents, within a specific time and place and family, with incredible capacities to think and feel and imagine and dream. This should lead us to live with wonder, awe, and reverence for who we are, and for the One who made us. We are divinely designed sacred people who have been created by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As such, we should pray, as Macrina Weiderkehr prayed so eloquently, “O God, help me to believe the truth about myself, no matter how beautiful.”

When Jesus said we should not worry about our lives, he asked us to make a comparison between ourselves and grass: “Consider the lilies of the field. . . . Even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:28-30). If God does such a fantastic job adorning the flowers and the grasses of the earth, how much more can he adorn us? In Dawn’s story at the beginning of this chapter, she was given an epiphany that a single blade of grass “was created by God and was meant by God to be in the world in this very clump of grass in this very yard.”

I think Jesus was saying the same thing. God cares about every single flower, about every blade of grass. And yet, the flowers and grasses are, as they say, “here today and gone tomorrow.” But you and I are unceasing spiritual beings, not accidental little lumps that are here today and gone tomorrow. How much more does God intentionally design and entirely sustain you and me. We are divinely designed, and deeply loved, unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe. As such, we are a part of a larger and more significant divine conspiracy. You are a divine work of art, a masterpiece just as you are. But God is not done with you. God, “by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).

Set your mind on this thought from above: that God, the Divine Forming Mystery, formed you.

I have found that remembering my Source, remembering that God, the Divine Forming Mystery, formed me and formed you, fills me with joy and passion. Remembering that our formation began before we were born, remembering that God lovingly preformed all people, and remembering that God is the hidden ground of all of our lives is a “thought from above” (Colossians 3:1-2) worth setting our minds on.

To that end, I have also found it useful to pray a prayer written by Fr. Adrian van Kaam. I leave it with you as a kind of benediction:

Whisper to me again

How you formed me in my mother’s womb,

Fashioned me over generations,

Over eons of unfolding of the earth

Until it could bear life

On its flaky crust, the dust

From which you formed our earthly frame

Endowing each of us with a name

Known to you alone.

Remind me how I dwelt in you,

My source and origin,

A call from eternity,

An archetype of life to be

Unique and irreplaceably

Your own.