I’d love to present to you a robust theology of human worth, but I’m constrained by my present limits simply to offer my experience and some reflection. I had imagined writing something that I could fairly title: “Total Depravity and Human Worth: What the Christian Thinks and what the Christian Should Think about Human ‘Worthiness’”. I won’t be so presumptuous now, but perhaps this and following reflections will serve to illuminate the complication of the topic of “worthiness” with the low self-worth of someone struggling with mental illness and soul-wounds.

            The issue that I wanted to get to is disclarity in the definition(s) of “worthiness” within the Christian worldview. In my attempt to delineate between definitions and create a helpful theology around it, I was admittedly encumbered by my baggage. I ended writing a longer version of this blog, and then four more blogs, before I got to my argument.

            I submit to you that affirmation of one’s worth is a human need. This reflection highlights how my own deficit of self-worth enfeebled me against basic life challenges, particularly heartbreak. 

            I was depressed and anxious from adolescence, and my cry for help was, paradoxically, high performance. I’ll work to explain this in later blogs but here it serves to highlight that I had identity-level pain from youth which I hid with good behaviour. I lashed-in, rather than lashing out. I complied. I pleased. I strove. 

            Working against my hidden war, the love of my mother fed my need to be valued. Her tender, emphatic hugs – her persistent desire to care for me – her attempts comfort me as she was able. These attended to my need to be valued and considered “worthy”. These diminished as she withered and disappeared when she died. The degree to which I lost her affection corresponded directly with the intensity with which I fell in love with a girl at college and craved her affection with intensity disproportionate to what the relationship actually warranted. My heart seized her affection – which she only ever gave in the measure of friendship – seized her affection as salvation. While she respected me, she did not reciprocate romantic affection and said quite directedly once, “I can’t be that for you.” I think it was evident to her that my “need” for her affection had a lot to do with losing my mother. She may not have seen as clearly that it also had a lot to do with losing affirmation of worth, which I had craved with crisis intensity since I was young.

            She rejected me (kindly) the day before a Valentine’s day and the day after Valentine’s day my mother told me she was definitely dying (February sucks). Both of these pulled the earth out from beneath me and I had only darkness for quite some time. The darkness was also self-hatred – furnace-like. The thoughts I thought were emotional self-harm. Viscous self-talk emerged often through my mouth, involuntarily. Breathing was hard and I was constantly nauseous. I looked longingly at the high edges of buildings.

            After a recovery that was barely more than stepping out of triage – after a sputtering trio of years – I fell in love with a second girl whose smile and whose kindness affirmed me. It felt like salvation, and I took grave emotional risks, knowing the fallout could be devastation. And the fallout was devastation. Breathing was hard and I was constantly nauseous. Fever pitch anxiety and depression like my personal Armageddon. The tectonics of my soul fissured and then shattered. This time I developed a chronic pain and fatigue syndrome like (but perhaps not exactly) fibromyalgia. I withdrew from collage a second time, and have not since been able to think about finishing my degree. The toll on my body has been life altering impairment for two and a half years.

            How could this happen to this good Christian boy? This model of faith and integrity? This high-achieving, well-respected, singer, artist, budding scholar? How did this boy with so many resources and loving parents fall prey to such total destitution?

I had tried my absolute hardest so serve God. I had been trying to eat healthy and live healthy. To get exercise. I also honestly tried to selflessly love the girls I fell for but my love in each circumstance was hijacked by my self-worth deficit. I imagine that the intensity of my need for affirmation was a deterrent to them; when other people have demonstrated such neediness, I was repelled from them.  I imagine also that if I had had a healthy self-worth at those times, I would not have “fallen” for them so recklessly fast. I would have had better boundaries for my own desires. I imagine also that stronger self-worth would have enabled me to breath properly and remain functional after being rejected.

            How was I high-achieving, loved and respected, and also so very, very needy and insecure under it all?

            I had lived a great number of years defying my need for worth, and/or trying to meet it in ineffective and unsustainable ways. I attempted not to be the “needy” friend or partner, or at least not to appear to be so. I tried hard, I think, not to be a needy son. But a duet of soul-breaking crisis in college confirmed to me quite finally that I could not run from my need. I was encouraged by a counsellor to say that I “have needs” rather than that I “am needy.” I think that is true, while I also will concede swiftly that some of my behaviours could have easily, even rightly, been called “needy”. I can hold that without shame now, however, because I see that those behaviours stem from legitimate need – particularly the need for affirmation of worth.

            The validation of my need for affirmation worth has been a pillar to any healing I’ve achieved since my second collapse. The second pillar of my healing has been the forgiveness of God and the third has been the solidarity of Christ with those who suffer. I see these movements of God, forgiveness and solidarity, to be God communicating worth to me and humanity. One could say that though sinful humanity does not “deserve” God’s love on the level of merit, we are counted worthy of it on the level of grace. We are given to be called God’s children, and that adoption is an attribution of value (1 John 3:1, Eph. 1:5).

            To Christians who do not struggle with identity level mental illness in the way that I do, the nuance of these statement is cumbersome semantics. For me, however, it is existentially necessary. After recovery, I hear now, and know, as I was not able to before, that I am wanted, that I am desired. It is the pleasure of God to save me. In pleasure there is an intrinsic assumption/attribution of value to what is delighted in. God loves me, and in love there is an intrinsic attribution of value to the object of love. The love of God is not just a cosmic judicial exchange by which sinners are made trophies. No indeed, the love of God is generously relational and full of emotion. The prophets are not ashamed to picture God as a longing lover. God is generous enough to ascribe worth to those who have earned unworthiness by their deviance from good.

            The gospel is not the gospel to me apart from these observations. Further blogs will explain the experience of my low self-worth and explain its development. The succeeding blogs attempt to define human “worthiness” in a Christian worldview. I write this in the sixth blog – and I’ll finish this reflection with the statement – “It is the great surprise of the Gospel that God considers us worthy of his affection despite our having earned otherwise.”