Who are you?

This post brought to you by my thoughts  from a class last year.

*The most important part is at the end.

As most of you may know the field of psychology and therapy can actually be very infuriating. I often feel like religion and faith are discounted, discredited, and even denigrated by psychologists, therapist, sociologists and the like. It seems that most of these people actually believe that religion, traditional values, and personal faith and testimony of truth is one of the major problems of our society. Even at BYU I hear this kind of sentiment and it saddens me. Okay... so it really frustrates me! Following is an account of one class period I had for a Therapeutic Recreation class, which is my major.

Some background:

In therapeutic recreation we speak a lot about replacing unhealthy thought processes, debilitating habits, and improper identities with new skills and identities using recreation. Which is great! How much better is it to identify yourself as a mountain biker, a singer, or to approach life with the same process it takes to climb a mountain or work together with a team of rowers than it is to be always looking for your next fix, identify as a gang banger, or believe yourself to be a failure? We can all agree the first examples are definitely the better of these.

The Lesson:

So, in one of my classes the professor asked us how do/should we determine our worth.

What would you answer? What do you identify yourself as? Where do you draw your self-worth?

Well, all of the normal answers followed and our professor wrote them on the board...

• Hobbies
• Activities
• Awards
• Scholastic Achievement

These first few answers were what we thought he wanted to hear. The professor than prompted us to go deeper...

• Service
• Our family
• Our children
• Missionary work

These were better and we felt good about these answers. As a class we have been so conditioned to discount religion and faith when speaking about psychology stuff that we first didn't think about it then were hesitant to call out the religious answers. I am ashamed to say that I too fell into this trap.

"NOPE! These are all wrong." Is what our professor answered after the second, more spiritual round of answers (So maybe that isn't exactly what he said but the quotes added more drama). How were these things wrong? Aren't we taught that service is one of the best cures to loneliness, worthlessness, and depression? Shouldn't our joy be great if we even bring one soul to the Christ? Shouldn't our focus be on our families and our personal testimony? Yes, these are all true but are not all the most solid foundations of our worth and identity.

To my surprise and delight, a therapist with a PhD, stated that the only true and solid source of our worth is the fact that...

• YOU ARE  A CHILD OF GOD

Hobbies and activities can become impossible to participate in with different life situations. Some one will always be more skilled than you and receive more/better awards. Some one will always seem to be more charitable and do more service, your family and children can be taken from you through death or fail to live up to your expectations. Your missionary work can be shunned and you may never see the fruits of your labors. Ultimately all of these sources have some kind of flaw in them or weakness that has the potential to actually degrade your self-worth.

The knowledge that you are a child of God and he He loves you and me enough to send his only begotten son to atone for our sins is where we gain our true strength. This is the foundation we must build upon. Our infinite worth (hear that? INFINITE! There is no end. First year of birth= $10,000, Funeral Costs+ healthcare= $A bajillion, Cost of your soul= Priceless!) comes solely from the fact that we are children of God; not from what we are good at, what we achieve, how many people we serve. Now that we know, this a quote from my wife's class notes that is very applicable:

"We don't create our worth, we discover it."

*This is the important part*
So this is all very uplifting but not worth anything if we don't figure out what it means to us. How do you/have you discovered your self worth? How does knowing or not knowing your self worth affect your day to day life?