Validated

 What is it that "validates" you as a person? As a man? As a woman? What is it that makes your life meaningful, that makes it matter? What is it that tells you that you matter? Is it found in your job, your income, your education level? Is it your degree of professional success, including ministry success? Is it found in the amount of recognition you've received? Have you received it by way of being a husband, wife, mother or father? 

So many of us define our value by what we do or what we have. If we feel like we've achieved what we want in these, we feel fulfilled, satisfied. Our lives have meaning. If we don't, well, we know the answer to that, don't we? There's no wrong in desiring any of the above. God does not see desires by themselves as evil, but He has never meant that we would find our value, our fulfillment, our meaning in the fulfillment of these desires. The truth of this is shown by what happens should any of them be lost to us. We can become empty and life loses much, if not all of its meaning. That's why so few feel secure in the realization of them. We live with fear of losing them, and fear will always end up destroying us.

I became a pastor forty years ago, and when I did I felt like I'd found what I'd been made for. It was the only thing I'd ever really loved doing. I loved it so much that my identity became completely wrapped up in being a pastor. A pastor was who I was, and not a man who was a pastor. I could not envision ever not being one. In the same way, I found meaning in my being a husband and a father. These were who I was. Pastor. Husband. Father. That's what validated me.....until all of it was lost.

I'll never forget the devastation of that time and I don't think He wants me to. As life came crashing down around me, my marriage destroyed, my daughter lost, my ministry ended, I didn't seem to know any longer who I was. I thought I did, when all were present. Now they weren't, and what did my life mean now? What value did I have now? In the rubble of the devastation, He came with answers, but it took time for Him to clear the rubble.

Over time, He began to show me who I really was. I was His. Yes, I'd known this, but somehow, it hadn't been enough. I had to be something, do something, achieve something. He said no, all I had to be was His. To be in Him. My value and validation came in that. Paul spoke of his relationship with the Father in Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, move, and have our being." Our reason for being is Him. To love Him and be loved by Him. To know He didn't create me first to be any of those things I'd lost. He created me for relationship with Him. I may have no longer been in the roles I'd lost, I was still His, a man of value and of purpose....even when I appeared to have no purpose at all. In the middle of all the rubble, I still had meaning in Him. So do you. As someone said, only God can tell us who we are.

Out of the rubble, He rebuilt my life, and though not all that was lost was restored, what He did in the rebuilding was richer and deeper than ever before. Yes, I still had and have desires, and I need to remain aware of how easily those desires can seduce me into allowing their realization to define me. When it happens, He always calls me back to Himself. I discover anew that it's in Him that I live, move, and have my being. 

Perhaps He calls you this day as well. Maybe you too have been finding your identity, your value, in what do or have. Maybe you live in fear of losing them, or have lost them. Discover as I did, and as I continue to discover, that life and purpose is not validated by what we are or what we've done. It's validated by who we are in Him and what He says about us. We can cease living in the trap of a false identity and meaning and simply come to Him. Come to Him, the One in who we live, move, and have our being. That my friends, is true validation.

Blessings,
Pastor O