One of the most common ways a child deals with feelings of worthlessness, writes Dr. Dobson, “is to surrender, completely and totally.”

[This person withdraws into a] shell of silence and loneliness, choosing to take no chances or assume unnecessary  emotional risks.  This person would never initiate a conversation, speak in a group, enter a contest, ask for a date, run for election, or even defend his honor when it is trampled…As comedian Jackie Vernon once said, “The meek shall inherit the earth, because they’ll be too timid to refuse it.”

Dale Ryan is CEO of Christian Recovery International, the parent organization of the National Association for Christian Recovery.  Many of the people seeking help struggle with this understanding of God and are unable to live whole, God-glorifying lives.  Ryan writes:

Does God avoid us because we are sinners?  If you have any doubt, any hesitation, about the answer to this question, I urge you to go back to the Bible.  Did God avoid us?  Is it not just the opposite?  Did not God come to us?  When God saw our pain, our brokenness, our defects of character, our insanity, what did God do?  God came.  Here.  To be with us.  To save us.  To make a new kind of life possible for us.  God’s holiness is not the fragile kind that would be tainted by contact with broken, bent, damaged people.  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who did not hide himself from our hopeless situation.  God saw.  God came—not to punish, not to nag, not to shame.  Thank God that we were not worthless “worms” to God!  We were, and are, precious, valuable.  Wanted, a source of delight to God.  That’s just basic Bible.  It may take a long time for this truth to sink in, but it’s not really fancy theology.  It’s Christianity 101…

We have learned very broken ways to think and feel about ourselves.  In recovery we struggle not to just think better about ourselves, but to do an honest self-assessment…Part of this self-assessment involves doing a “fearless moral inventory.”  The content of our inventory can be a pretty discouraging and disturbing list.  But the process of doing our inventory is to be characterized by fearlessness.  What does “fearless” mean?  Certainly it means that we will be courageous while working on our inventory.  But more specifically it means that we will seek to be so secure in God’s love for us that no matter what we find in our inventory, we will know that we are still loved, still valuable, still of infinite importance to our Higher Power.  It is only love that can sustain us when we experience the fear that comes from shame, from rejection, from resentments and from guilt.  We seek to do a fearless inventory because we want God to so fill us with love that little room remains for fear.  May God grant you the grace this day to think and feel about yourself in ways that are consistent with how your loving and grace-full Father thinks and feels about you.