Many of you will be familiar with the traditional folk song “There is a
ship”. One of the verses goes like
this: There is a ship, and it
sails the sea, it’s loaded deep, as deep can be; but not as deep as the love I’m in; I know not if I sink or swim”.
There have been many times in my life, when I have been so desperate,
so downcast, so despairing, that I didn’t know if I was sinking or
swimming. In fact, there have been
years on end in my life, when I was only just keeping my head above water, in
every sense of the word;
emotional, physical, spiritual and mental. And I want to tell you, very
briefly, how I emerged from this dungeon into the sunlight of the best
self-esteem I’ve had in my life.
A big cause of all this angst was my marriage breakdown. God has created us all with a unique
“self” – a blueprint of who we are, and it’s one of the most precious things we
are given. Lots of things build on
that blueprint – life experience, parents, friends, even place. To have that crushed and manipulated
and denied, is a terrible thing.
This is what my husband tried to do to me over many years. He did it by
alternate, deliberate episodes of carefully crafted apparent care,
thoughtfulness and love, then terrible vengeance, deliberate hurting, rejection
and dominating criticism. This emotional blackmail is a terrible form of
control and destruction. It leaves the victim anxious, demoralized, bewildered.
In those final, terrible days, before he left, there was only a fragment of my self left. My ex husband took it, trampled on it and walked away. It left a great hole in my inner being
which was spent, empty, unrequited;
a wasteland of broken reeds; a mourning which was unsoothed and
uncomforted. But I don’t want to dwell on that. To be fair to him, I don’t
think he realized he was doing it.
He was acting out his own terrible form of selfish instability and
rebellion. I never understood why
he felt he had to treat me in this way, or even more, why he went on to treat
our children in this way too. I don’t care any more; it’s no longer important. But when he found, after 17 years of marriage, that he couldn’t be the complete keeper of my
soul, mind and spirit, he threw me away. After all that, one of the last things
he said to be was “you were never good enough”. Yet, here I am today stronger, self-reliant and with a much
larger, more defined and healthier self esteem than I’ve ever had. How can that be? So after all that
rejection and anguish, how can I possibly stand here and tell you about
self-esteem? There are many paths to self-esteem; indeed self-esteem is a multi-layered thing, existing in our
personal thoughts about ourselves, our ability to relate to people and our
ability to perform our jobs. It’s influenced by many things, not the least of
which is our experience in childhood, especially from our parents.
We tend to think these days that self esteem is given by how we look,
the kind of job we do, the sort of car we drive, our place in the community,
and especially by how much money we have.
The more of all these we have, the better we should feel about
ourselves. Thus says the media,
the motivation gurus, our society,
even our friends.
Here I am; someone with
none of the generally accepted requirements for self-esteem. I have no status (in fact, I have what
I call anti-status, because I’m a single parent). I perform an essential but mind-numbingly ordinary job; I
have no wealth; I drive a
fairly old car and up to a few
years ago, I lived in a fibro house.
In the world’s eyes, I have failed at marriage. I should feel bad about myself. But still, despite these things,
there has been this rising of self-worth, like a clear calm stream; an
awareness of true self-worth, falling on my battered senses, with the cadence
of a beautiful and serene melody.
How can it be that my sense of worth increased, rather than decreased?
Let me share with you just a few things I’ve learned: And we could spend ages on this topic but let me give you
just two.
1 Bring all that happens to you,
to the cross of Jesus. I had to try and understand why it was that this man
could treat me like a doormat. It
was not a pleasant process and it took years of prayer and pondering and
ploughing through my life, my attitudes, my Christian beliefs. I knew I had
lots of very good qualities in my character, but I also learned how vulnerable
I was to people who would bully and hurt me. To be absolutely honest, one aspect of the Christian ethic,
(ie wives should be submissive to their husbands) if taken the wrong way, can
breed a terrible sort of man, and they will always be drawn to a woman who
takes the “treat others better than yourself” verses more to heart. But I don’t
want to dwell on these verses, but rather on our working with God, to achieve all that he wants for us and
for his glory.
What is important is to be honest before God, and bring him all that’s
happened to us, and ask him to help us cope with it. Some people find this difficult and perhaps if we didn’t
have times of suffering, we would never be forced to look deep into our own
hearts and discover all the imperfections there. People who are not self-aware are the worst kind of selfish
people. They deny their faults and
blunder through life, hurting anyone who gets in their way. Jesus loves us no matter what faults we
have, and when we become aware of them, he is able to heal us. One pitfall of examining ourselves is
that we can get stuck in it and become too introspective and become overwhelmed
with what’s happened to us. If you
only look at this aspect, you’ll trudge down the steps of self pity and it will
become harder to trudge back up again into the light of healing. You need to be kind to yourself but not
self-indulgent. You have to be
willing to get to know yourself, warts and all, and in the presence of God,
allow him to begin a healing process. God’s strength is made perfect in
weakness. Listen to 2 Cor 12:9-10. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you,
for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more
gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in
hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am
strong.
2 Make God’s precepts your
own value system and stick to them, no matter how others treat you. The getting
of true self-esteem involves more than just pampering ourselves, and stroking
our own ego; it has nothing to do
with positive self-talk (although that has it’s place); it has nothing to do with retail
therapy; it has nothing to do with
power over others; it has nothing
to do with the house we live in or our address. It has nothing to do with “things” at all. Rather, it
requires a personal resolve to stay true to our own value system, when it would
be easier to cop out and behave with no personal integrity. It requires digging deep into who we
are, building a set of values, and living according to those values. It requires conviction, courage and
tenacity to stay true to our value system, when life’s unkind face would have
us compromise and behave less gallantly.
When we resolve to
face the ravages of life with goodwill and a strong desire to do the right
thing, as dictated by our own value system; When we behave with personal integrity despite the
injustices, the hardships, the terrible jostling of our souls; when we endeavour and endure with our own set of ideals when it
would be far easier to give in and become lesser people, we reap the reward of a quiet, growing
confidence that we matter, that we can achieve; that we are people who can face some of the storms of life
and emerge stronger. We like who we are. We have earned our own respect. This is why God commands us
to live this way. Priceless
treasure.
For the Christian, this goes against all the worldly
advice about self esteem. Bless
those who curse you. Forgive those
who wronged you. Pray for those
who spitefully use you. Can you
imagine the corporate world giving this advice to their people? But, when we do this, we are
changed; we learn to value what’s
happened to us less, but value ourselves more. Where’s the sermon I did about
as we do God’s precepts we are changed?
The other less travelled path to self esteem is the old fashioned
notion of living with regard to how we treat others. This goes against all the modern preaching about demanding
MY rights, pursuing MY dream, protecting MY interests, grabbing as much money
and status for MYSELF as I possibly can.
Could it be that this kind of thing actually encourages bad
self-esteem? Depression, which has
connections to self-esteem, is almost to epidemic proportions in this
country. Could it be that we’ve
lost sight of a nobler belief system which values how we treat others and nurtures our own personal self respect at the
same time?
What if the very fabric of our self-esteem has nothing to do with money
or class? I mean the very
deep-down blueprint of what makes us who we are and how we value ourselves. Money, status, power; these are outward things, imposed or
gained, or given or worked for, or even taken. These are open to decay by shifting fortune, illness, chance
even. These things… status and
power are so closely linked to wealth.
And wealth is such a fickle, deceitful thing. Wealth is fool’s gold.
What if true self-esteem grows out of something less tangible, yet more
within our control? We can choose
our own value system; we can
choose to follow it. It’s the
following of it when it would be easier not to, which ploughs the ground of our
character, and produces a great crop of the beautiful flowers of
self-value. For me, there will
always be a little wasteland of barren ground inside me, which is my divorce
and other painful things. We all have these patches of wasteland inside us. But
there is also a verdant garden of these beautiful flowers, and they will always
self-seed, as long as I continue to water them with the living out of my
personal value system.
This holding on to God and
His precepts in times when the world wants to kick our heads, is what makes us
strong; it’s like a quiet,
life-changing journey… I call it a low miracle. God is able to take something so negative and so destructive
and turn it into an unbreakable confidence in His power; a sense of self which is not selfish,
but whole and strong and
nourished; it’s this kind of self
esteem which can put others’ needs first, without feeling down trodden; it can develop healthy relationships
with others because it’s not super sensitive to criticism. It can assert it’s right to be treated
properly, without feeling guilty.
It doesn’t come from asserting our rights, it comes from living out
God’s precepts in the face of what others do to us.
