It’s so easy for us humans to get bogged down in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which are mostly not good stories.
Our mental chatter goes round and round about how inadequate we are, how much we mess up, how we aren’t as good as someone else is, how we ought to be better, ought to do better.
All of this dismal self-chatter stops us living fully.
Positive thinking is supposed to combat this negativity. But it works only to a limited degree. It never really cures us of our self-deprecating self-talk.
That’s because positive thinking is directed at how we see ourselves, how we think of ourselves, what we tell ourselves.
That’s not deep enough. We have to go deeper, to the source of the put-down.
Low self-esteem insults us unrelentingly. But we can’t “up” our self-esteem too successfully because it involves looking at ourselves—and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves is someone we feel we have to apologize for much of the time.
We are told God loved us first, before we could ever reciprocate, ever do anything to merit love.
We are told we were loved “while we were yet sinners,” which in modern language means while we were dysfunctional, imprisoned as we were in our self-negating mental chatter.
Why would God love us in our dysfunctional state?
There’s only one reason: we are chips off the old divine block. If you are at all normal, you can’t help but love your children—love the creatures you have brought into being. Doesn’t any normal person feel that way about their children?
We are essentially like God, God’s own “kind.” Hence God can’t help loving us because we are fundamentally lovable.
If you are a man, try not noticing a stunningly beautiful woman. If you are a woman, try not noticing a gorgeous hunk of a man. Or for a gay person, just change the equation.
We can’t help noticing. For the same reason, God can’t help noticing us.
That’s because we are noteworthy.
There’s something fantastically attractive at the heart of humanity—at the heart of all humans, even the Adolph Hitlers of the world, shocking as that may be. The real attractiveness of our core is just well covered over in most of us, and in some of us all but totally hidden, as with a Hitler.
“God so loved the world,” says the gospel author. Of course. Why wouldn’t God love us, divine offspring that we are? It's this reality, our true nature, that Jesus is all about awakening us to.
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving--A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors. He writes The Compassionate Eye daily, together with his daily author blog The Sunday Blog, at www.namastepublishing.com