Values

I’m feeling a little under the weather today, yet have to be at work because the boss isn’t around, and someone needs to give the analysis for the trade window.

Something stirred inside me when I read Christabel's blog entries. I guess part of it had to do with my own experience with adolescence and even though I was more centred and having less extreme emotions, I struggled. Yes, I did. I struggled with approval, with peer pressure, with homosexuality, with doubt, with esteem issues, with academics (or disinterest thereof), with authority, with popularity. The human emotion can sometimes be a tempest of wild and unabating extremeties. I guess she would have to fight her own demons. I have faith that she will survive, and emerge victorious.

A short analogy comes to mind at this point: There once was a thief that broke into a supermarket one night, as one would break into an apartment. But this thief did a very strange thing; instead of stealing items from the shelves, he swapped price tags on the items on the shelves. He would take the price tag off an expensive item and put it on a cheap item, and vice versa.

Strange, isn't it? But it really isn't, because this is what the devil seeks to do to us in the world. He would take what was unimportant, of little value, and swap it with an item of great value. Because of that, the world becomes confused, and imagines the item with the expensive price tag to be one of great value, when only God knows the true value of the items on the shelves. Things like popularity, money, career, social standing, beauty - These become items of great value, and integrity, love, contentment, respect are relegated to the bottom of the priority list.

Christabel, the Bible says this:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:10-11)

This is what I would tell my students, and something I constantly remind myself: That price that Jesus paid for me? That's my value. That's what I'm worth. I should never allow the world to put a price tag on me.