The world does not determine your value

Jonas Ellison
2 min readApr 29, 2022
Wildfire-damaged campground — Frenchman Lake, CA

Looking at any baby, you can see that from the first breath, they are whole and complete as humans. No one expects a thing from a newborn. Their value is innate. It’s a given.

And then, life moves along.
The newborn grows up.

And in that time, the world around them piles on all kinds of conditions on their worth. Their value turns from a given to an…

‘if’

But this is total cocklehockey (yes, I say, cocklehockey). As soon as life flowed through their veins, that human, in the eyes of God, was forever all the human it needed to be.

In God’s eternal Word, it was made whole.
Completely loved.
Entirely loveable.
And a handcrafted vessel handcrafted by God to extend such love.

But the world convinces them that their worth must be earned. The world makes them think that they need to achieve what they’ve never lost. The world adds layers and layers of counterfeit requirements onto something that can never be either earned or lost.

And what happens?…

This lie is taken on as truth. The lie replaces God’s loving word. And from their mouth, the lie is perpetuated to others when they get old enough to speak and scared enough to proclaim fear.

And so, you and I… We play both sides of this grand contrived scam. We are both the grown baby as well as the grown babies standing around imposing conditions on other grown babies.

But here’s the rub, y’all…

You’ve never lost it.
You’re just as human
and just as whole
as you’ve always been.

(And so are they.)

Our job is to look at our long list of cooked-up requirements that stand in the way of our value/worth/wholeness/etc… And to move them from the “Requirement” column… to the column titled ‘Things to do because they sound fun, good, true, beautiful, etc.’ If any of them don’t fit in that second column, we have permission from God to fartcan them altogether.

It’s really a sweet feeling to wake up from a bad dream.
To see the farce as a farce.
And to wake up to a new day that has never changed.

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Jonas Ellison

Not here on Medium much anymore. Head over to my Substack to see the latest: jonasellison.substack.com 👍🙏🤙