Thursday | Week 7

Do I matter?

Am I seen?

Two questions I spent a good bit of my adolescence trying to answer. I came from a great family, and I knew they loved me, but that wasn’t enough for some reason. I wanted to matter to people that weren’t required to love me. The way this played out for me was spending a lot of time on my looks, constantly wanting to be with my friends, and doing pretty much whatever it took to be popular. 

Slowly over time, I realized I had, in some ways, traded and compromised who I was, to be accepted by a world that was always changing its mind about what was cool. It became too much for me. I was tired and carried a lot of secret guilt and shame.

Thankfully, throughout this season I was also still spending parts of my summer at a Christian camp that I had attended since I was little. I had some amazing friends and counselors that listened to me share what was going on in my life, and also encouraged me to take my thoughts, feelings and worries to God. They also reminded me that who I was and what I had done were not the same thing. These people showed me that in Christ, I could be made new (2 Corinthians 5:17), and that I always mattered and was always seen by Him. When I let that truth sink in, it changed me forever.

In our scripture reading for this week, we see that Jesus always treats people as valuable. To the Pharisees, this woman was just a pawn. They were using her to satisfy their own desire to try and trap Jesus. But Jesus treated her like a real person. His actions and words reminded her that she was not just the sum total of all things she had done wrong, but that she was so much more than that. He also gave her permission to immediately begin to live differently. And I believe from that point forward, she was never the same.