Valuable

By Geoff Woodcock

The way you value yourself and other people is dramatically affecting your quality of life. Right now, it is shaping the decisions you make; influencing how you spend your time and money, how you relate to others, and how you act. Your sense of value is quietly touching virtually every aspect of your life. But do you really know what you're worth?

In this short book, we discover the science behind value and use it as a standard for evaluating different worldviews, political ideologies, and religious beliefs. By understanding the dynamics of value and its connection to joy, we discover a surprising key to flourishing in the midst of an intense and changing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoff Woodcock
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781991159465

Geoff Woodcock

Hello Reader! My name is Geoff (pronounced “Jeff”), and I am the author of the One with Christ series of books, a speaker, and founder of the Freeslaves.org project. I live in Dunedin, New Zealand, with my glorious wife Melanie and we have been blessed with four exceptional children.I started following Jesus as a child, but it was not until my early twenties that I began to come out of legalism and into the grace of His awe-inspiring love. I now live to love Jesus. He has done more in my life than I could ever express, and I pray He will always be my reason, my passion, my vision, and my goal.Jesus says that Scripture depends on the commands to love God and love others. In the One with Christ series of books, we look at the Bible through this lens of love in dependence on the Holy Spirit. The goal of the books is not simply to inform or educate the reader, but to help the reader connect with and encounter God. We've had some awe-inspiring testimonies from readers who have had their lives changed as they've encountered Jesus while doing the devotional reflections in the books. I hope and pray it will be the same for you.May our God of love launch you into new depths of life as you grow in love, intimacy and unity with Jesus.All blessings in the love of Christ,Geoff

Book preview

Why

You don’t know what you’re worth. And that’s a problem.

In life, our sense of value affects everything we do. It shapes the decisions we make; it influences how we spend our time and money; it affects how we relate to others, how we behave, and what behaviour we tolerate in other people—our sense of value touches virtually every aspect of our life.

My father left our family when I was eight years old, Kathryn said as she shared her story with me.[2] I kind of blamed myself. I thought that he left because I wasn’t good enough for his love. Kathryn then talked about how her father’s rejection shaped her life and impacted her marriage.

I spent the first seven years of our marriage trying to get James to divorce me. I made his life hell, but he never gave up on me. And then, I read a book and I realised what I had been doing. I had been trying to get him to leave me so I could prove to myself that I was unlovable.

This same dynamic is at work in most people’s lives—on some level, we all struggle to believe that we have real value. It’s like our true value is hidden within a maze of memories, emotions, and beliefs about ourselves. And most of us do not know where to start the search or if we even have the courage to begin. But unless we are willing to take the first step, our lack of value will quietly sabotage different parts of our lives and impact our relationships with others. It may not be as extreme for us as it was for Kathryn and James, but it will still be very real. So imagine how life would change if you truly valued yourself, your time, and your actions. Imagine how it would feel to be able to inspire the same sense of value in others. Now is a time for change. So be brave, take a breath, and come find out what your life is worth!

More than ever before, the world is experiencing the widespread impact of this loss of value. In people of all ages, anxiety and depression rates are spiralling out of control.[3] Many of us are trying to counter this descent. We tell people that everyone has value and that there is meaning and purpose to be found in life. Yet so often our words are ignored. Inwardly people respond, You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am or what I’ve been through. I want to believe you, but I don’t.

Unless we can give people a convincing reason why they are valuable, our words are meaningless. Why is the missing key.

So can you tell someone why they are valuable? Can you see the value in your own life? If someone were to look from the outside at your life, would they think that you have value?

Before we can explore these questions, we need to understand the logic that we all use to value things. If something works according to its design, it is valuable to us. For example, we only value a cup because it can hold our drink. If the cup is cracked or broken, it is worthless. The same is true for everything we have or use in life. If a clock tells the time; if a washing machine cleans clothes; if an oven warms food; if a lightbulb gives light; if anything fulfils its purpose, we value it. And if it is broken, we either repair it or throw it away.

Without realising it, most of us use the same logic to value our own lives. We feel like we need to be fulfilling some sort of purpose in life, but no one is really sure what that is. We feel broken but we don’t know how to repair ourselves, so often we just throw our lives away. We waste our time with the various distractions of the world, and many of us dive into addiction. We are thankful for the comfort of each escape, but as we return to life, we still feel broken. Deep down, we know we need fixing, but when we look at the pieces of our soul, it is like an unsolvable puzzle. How can we connect the pieces if we don’t know what the finished puzzle looks like?

Imprinting

If only it was as easy as it is with our physical bodies. Everyone knows what a healthy body is like. We are all biologically designed to breathe, eat, sleep, talk, walk and so on. However, as babies we had no idea of this design. For a time, even though we could see our own arms, we didn’t realise that they were a part of our body. They were just some random things that would occasionally hit our heads. Over time, we learned that our arms are a part of us that we can control. We learned to reach out, to take hold of things, and to put them in our mouths. As babies, we needed to discover every aspect of how life worked, and we did this by watching and interacting with the people around us.

This process of learning is called imprinting and it works well when the parents or caregivers are healthy. However, there are times when this is not the case. I have a friend who is fostering a young girl who had been tragically neglected by her parents during her early years. She was kept in a room full of cats and she rarely saw her parents. By the time authorities discovered her at the age of three, she believed she was a cat. She meowed instead of talked, licked her arms to clean herself, moved like a cat, and ate cat-food. Without human contact, she had developed her sense of identity from the cats around her. When my friend and his wife took her into their family, they had to teach this beautiful young girl what it meant to be human and help her to discover her true identity.

In our infancy, our brains are so immature that we have no way of knowing if the people we are imprinting on are actually giving us a healthy model of humanity. In fact, as babies, we lack the ability to question if our models are even human at all. Sadly, this has been proven many times in the past by children who have been raised by cats or dogs or monkeys. In the absence of human parents, these children imprinted on what they could see, and they grew up acting just like the animals who raised them.[4]

While such extreme childhood experiences are rare, it is still common for children to go through events that lead them to accept a distorted sense of design. These events often leave a lasting impact on their identity. Like Kathryn, when a child experiences violence or rejection from a parent, the imprinting that takes place can leave the child believing that something is wrong with them—that they are bad, unworthy, or unlovable. While the fear of rejection or violence may motivate children to change their behaviour, beneath the surface, the idea they are not worthy of love settles like silt upon their soul