Esteem

“What a waste of time!” 
I have spent a career trying to be better, more refined and more accomplished in what I do on my job. I've tried to be equitable, sincere, and polite even. I have tried to show courtesy and respect as well as be accommodating and yet, I still have an uneasy feeling about who I am. I might try to polish the veneer of my professional façade and indeed in public, be consistent in my approach to life and my faith, yet in the quiet of my heart, the inner turmoil of conflict between my perceptions of self and the reality of my thoughts betray my true self.

I have struggled my whole life for identity. I have no real self-esteem. I would easily believe that this blog, the 43 before it, my teaching in the small group that meets in our home, and my worship leading, are all part of me trying to make up for something I feel that is missing from my life. I find it difficult to accept the friendship of others because of the isolation of my childhood and I am not good at developing my relationships beyond the obvious courtesy we all have towards each other. I have never really been able to ‘hook-up’ with people and form strong friendships. I suppose on reflection, I don’t do anything to develop these relationships because from my perspective of the people I know, I assume that they would rather be doing something else with someone else.

I suppose it’s easier for me that way. I don’t need to bother about anyone affecting my sense of emotional well-being, nor have I the need to develop a dependence on relationships that could go in directions that I don’t want to go in. No, I am better off by myself. In my nuclear family and in my limited interactions, I can control my world much more easily. These are the emotions that arise in my head each time I feel as though I am threatened by external factors beyond my control or when I feel like I need to protect myself from what I perceive may be a threat.

I have no excuses for this behaviour… I am emotionally and socially broken from a difficult childhood where each day I endured name calling and bullying. I’m not even trying to say, “Please accept my lack of social graces”, I am putting my hands up and saying, “I’m broken.” My story is probably no different to many children growing up in 1970’s Britain. Parental discipline involved corporal punishment of some kind and a lot of shouting. Children had a love/fear relationship with their parents where in our innocence, we would role play with our Star Wars toys or our Action Man (if you were a boy), play football in the back alley or play hide and seek. I can remember long summers where we would stay out later in the warmth of the evening sun until dusk, where children would play together for hours.

When we did get it wrong, there was the usual inquisition and slap on the leg. There was also the ensuing drama when we got older, where our parents tried to make us accountable for our actions. This could involve a mixture of being shouted at and being slapped. A slap across the face or head meant that we knew the argument had escalated beyond our pleading for our honesty. Being told to pull your own pants down, so that the punishment you were considered deserving of could be administered, psychologically reinforced our subjugation to their moral authority as their children.

So for me anyway, I didn’t question my parents authority, I did what they asked, followed wherever they went, behaved as they asked. I had no real imagination to dream of anything more for my life than what it was. I obediently went to school and did my homework. By secondary school however, my character was odd and I became that peculiar child with a haircut provided by my mother in the kitchen, and clothing that was obviously purchased from the cheapest stores, due to it being unbranded and ill-fitting. Amongst my peers, I became an easy target for bullying.

It started with name calling at first, then it progressed to made-up stories and innuendo. I was shunned and ostracised by my peers often sitting by myself for lesson after lesson, and I hated myself for it. I was miserable for most days. At home I feared putting a foot wrong, where the bare hand of childhood discipline became a slipper in the teenage years. My mother, now divorced and having to care for four boys was ruthless in her discipline. We were not allowed to sleep in late, having to do household chores almost as a currency for being allowed to live in the house. We had no money or holidays, no identity other than what we were allowed to express through my mother’s life. We lived the life that many children worldwide live, who go to their second parents’ house for the weekend; we were passed around like a commodity. I saw many things that I shouldn’t have seen and bore the emotional pain that went with it.

I internalised many experiences, hardening my heart against the emotional blackmail of being made to feel that I was always in the wrong and could do nothing right. I went to school to experience more jibes and prejudice that I seemingly deserved, particularly with regard to my sorry state. I was miserable, alone and isolated in a seemingly cruel world. So I hope this helps to explain why my mind is plagued with the seemingly irrational fears I have with interacting with people today. I am not proud of the way I am… the way that I react to various situations or deal with people who offer friendship and hospitality. I don’t have a natural happiness or joy for just being me, as the things in my childhood never allowed me to believe I could be happy. I look back at my childhood now with great sadness and with a tinge of remorse.

As I stated earlier, I am not offering this story as an excuse for my present behaviour, but as a context for my reactions and the precautions that I have to battle with my mind each day. Every incidence of failure, whether it be in my relationships, working life or my church community, resurrect my fears of being unworthy and in being unacceptable to others. I have worked hard to make my life a success, not because I thought that I deserved it but rather, that I felt that I needed to work hard so that I could cement my place in the social setting that I existed. I have a strong feeling of unworthiness strapped to my back that makes me hunch my shoulders, point my face to the ground, avoiding eye contact and always taking a back seat.

The first term that I returned home from University, I arrived to find that all of my possessions from my childhood had gone, including my bed. I spent each semester break on the floor of what used to be my bedroom, in a sleeping bag and no mattress. I worked every holiday to make my University pay, long shifts in factories, doing as much overtime as possible. My mum would demand payment for unpaid bills or broken electrical appliances because I had to pay rent for sleeping on the floor. I had at least been fed after all. Going back to University ‘Diggs’ was a relief as I could have my life back.

The effect of this was that I subconsciously became dependent on education as my key to a more successful life. I was secure in a weird way, in education as an institution for my surrogacy, until I could stand on my own two feet. I can remember rationing myself to £5 sterling per week… I had no wealthy parent to bail me out if I got into debt, no inheritance, and no savings. I was indeed alone. I couldn't consider a University life full of socialising and gap years, tours around the world, or any particular indulgence. If I got into debt, then I would pay the price later.

We all live for the dream of our imaginings… “When I am a…. I will…” University for me, was what I needed to do to get into teaching – get a degree, teaching certification and hopefully, employment? I did meet some of the most influential and generous people along the way but not one friend from my school years or university years remain. Yes, there have been people I have been close to, but in the end, I find that my phone remains silent. In the three years since my 40^th birthday surprise meal, where my wife gathered together some friends to celebrate with me, two of those people are no longer part of my life. I know that seasons change and people depart, but I have so few real relationships that I have stopped trying to account for them, conveniently believing that I am simply not good enough for them.

I seem to need the life skills I developed as a child as much today as I did then. I go to work and get hammered over the head with standards and procedures designed to tell you what you have got to do to improve and go home anxious about how I could achieve that. For example, I left work on Friday evening mulling over how I could use the bank holiday to catch-up with school work. As I drove home, the radio presenter got his listeners to text-in their holiday destinations. As I sat in the traffic listening, my ears pricked up when they mentioned places around the country I knew well, Whitby in North Yorkshire, The Lake District in Cumbria and Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain. I could close my eyes and picture each location and the happiness enshrined in the memories of it, before the traffic moved forward and I was brought back to the reality of GCSE moderation.

I hate this intrusion on my life. I want none of it. Yet, it is my job and I am obligated to do what is required regardless of the time commitment. My wife is my one source of companionship and I have two lovely children. They complete me. I will get up each morning for eternity to ensure that they are happy and secure in this world. I chose to love them in this way, so in spite of my emotional frailty, I will endure. Yet when work intrudes on our family life, as it so often does, I feel grieved by it.

However, I know that despite this, I am not alone. God is the author of my life and I will honour his will for me by being obedient. I know that God alone can complete me and God alone can bring honour to my life. I know this because no matter how much I love my wife and children, my actions cannot satisfy the desires of my heart. There will always be something that I cannot do or should have done. My failure in whatever these tasks are likely to be, will cement in my mind a penalty point that I was simply not good enough. In doing so, it dims the brightness of my sense of self-worth because if my family are my sole identity, then I would feel like a failure for being foolish enough to forget it.

It is the same for my friendships and my job status. If I derived my sense of worth from my social connections and popularity, then I would be nothing. If it was my work, I would also be nothing. For both of these parts to my life, I consider myself to be a failure. At the height of my teaching career, I presented at national conference and had delegates queuing for my teaching resources. Now I sit in meetings being lectured by 23 year old, fresh out of college probationary teachers, on the finer art of teaching. It’s ironic that I have been teaching longer than they have been alive, yet there I sit.

Any structure that we put around our character in order to build our sense of self-worth is liable to failure or at the very least, at threat from being torn down. Just as much as we wear our football shirt with pride through the highs and lows of our team’s success and failure, so we too wear a veil of civility over the hidden storms of life. However, it is when this veil is torn in two that our true nature is exposed and we can either descend into the depths of our human emotion or we can choose to forsake our will for Gods so that we can begin to relate more freely to our human condition and our relationship with him. It really is that simple, yet we are quick to over complicate it. Jesus tells us to forsake everything for him, and he means all of you.

On the whole, we vastly over-estimate our sense of worth and value. Whilst society flatters us in our social standing and we are rewarded materially with the wealth of a successful career, we can be fooled into thinking that everything is all right. When the fine balance between our health and material well-being is derailed somehow, we can also have a wobble in our faith life. It is Jesus that adds everything to our lives, not us. There are times where in order to get to the gold, you have to first mine through tons of ballast and waste before we can locate the treasure within.

It’s our pride that is wounded when problems emerge within our carefully crafted life. We think that if we can put all of the pieces of the jigsaw together ourselves, we can want to complete the puzzle ourselves in order to find meaning to our lives without God. The reality is that it is impossible to do it by ourselves. Very often, you find the very things that one group find so liberating, become a bondage as soon as the honeymoon period ends. Until you have given it all away to Jesus, you will always think that the world owes you the very things you think you have lost or felt entitled to. No matter how hard you try, you can seem to be getting nowhere. If indeed you do get to where you wanted to go, it is common to find that as soon as you have attained that success you craved, when you look at yourself, you are still the same. You feel no more complete than if you were still wishing on the dream.

When you have truly died to self, you are then ready to pick up the mantle that Jesus has given to each one of us, his grace. When we are following our own dream, and doing what we feel is right, it makes us feel good about ourselves for a season but in reality, we are lost in our own meaning of existence. When our dreams become all consuming, we elevate them beyond the ordinary, to a place of prestige – an anticipation or hopefulness for something better. When we fail to attain that which we aspire to, our inner self mourns for what we feel we have lost. Sometimes, when it is our own actions that cause the loss of an aspect of what we hope for, we can feel doubly conflicted in our emotions.

When we are looking for esteem from our family or from any other social status, or from any combination of cultural expressions we use to define ourselves, we are leaving ourselves prone to the frailty of our emotions and the loneliness of our humanity. If this reality really is our ‘one-life’ and we have not met the expectations we hold of ourselves, we are going to become increasingly frustrated with our lot. The increasingly nagging voice in our head telling us that we are a failure, makes us start to look for alternatives. 

"The number of marriages that have failed because one partner starts to look outside of the relationship for that elusive idea of a perfect partner, is currently at 13 per hour in the UK, with 71% of those being first marriages."

Many blame God for these distractions… our health and the loneliness of cancer for example, the onset of dementia - for those whose lives add so much richness to our own, being robbed of their identity through the loss of their own mind; their memories and personality seemingly lost to eternity. There are so many strands to our humanity for which their absence grieves us; in whose dilemma we share and in whose burden we would love to take away from them. When all seems impossible and we are looking for the improbable to occur, we blame God for it not happening as we want it to. We might profess to disown God for the majority of our lives, yet when trouble knocks on our door, we look for a source outside of our experience to recompense us for our calamity.

God is more than a convenient metaphor for someone or something out there that can become a target for our frustration. When our hope is dashed, or our dreams dampened and our human frailty uncovered, we recognise that beyond our status, beyond our material wealth, beyond even our conscious thinking, there is still a small voice calling out to us, knocking at the door of each of our lives, waiting to be invited in. This voice is Jesus calling out to us: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for my souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, NLT)

What is it that we need rest from? How can we identify with Jesus here? The answer is never easy because we all think that we are impervious to the storms of life, comfortable in who we are and these terrible things happen to others, not me. There is also the other extreme, where people believe that God is indeed dead. He is a figment of an immature and superstitious mind that has been superseded by science and reason. 


Yet knowledge fades, generations come and go and even science changes its mind. But what remains, is still the same question we have all asked; ‘What is our purpose? How did we get here? What are we to become? Only God offers an answer to these questions, and we can find our purpose in the completeness of Jesus. Jesus said that he was the source of living water, he was the bread of life and he had come to do his Fathers will. So in the analogy that Jesus uses of himself, we can sense that in him, we will nourish our spiritual needs through his presence and by entering into a relationship with him, we can find what we are truly looking for.

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can come to the father except through me.” (John 14:6)

It is so hard to come to this place because we feel we need so many other things in our lives. Even those of us who have travelled with God for many years find this journey, a difficult path to take. It is so much more convenient to hold onto our grief or onto our pain, thinking that we cannot give it up. Sometimes we use this pain to help define who we are. It becomes such a fall-back to our personality, that we forget that it was ever painful. We react according to our character, thinking that everything is going well for a while until something stops us in our tracks. There is bitterness in this place, where we can become anaesthetised to the dull ache inside of our conscious thinking, moving swiftly on to the next experience or action, so that we do not dwell there for too long.

Is this really life as we would want it or would we be glad to be rid of it? Do we really want to carry around our secret pain, out of view and out of mind, but always present and always disparaging? No amount of coping mechanisms, such as ‘Mindfulness’, the new self-help technique stolen from Buddhism but adopted in the City of London to help those working on the stock market to deal with the stress, can account for the completeness in which God removes our self-doubt. In all of the self-help strategies we might employ in psychotherapy sessions, there is always the need for each one of us to take control, learn how to manage our emotions, and seek within ourselves, a method of distancing ourselves from our fears. This however is a futile effort because as soon as we feel that one action has been conquered, another one slots into place that was bigger than the first.

Like Jesus’ disciples in the storm on the lake, they were petrified at what they saw, yet Jesus was asleep in the bottom of the boat, oblivious of the storm. He had peace in the middle of the storm because he was secure in his identity. Wouldn’t we appreciate this peace? I know that I would. Accepting Jesus as Lord of our lives is sealed by the comfort of the Holy Spirit, who reassures us of our place in the grander scheme of life which is eternal. 

"When we accept Jesus into our lives as the source of our esteem, we also begin an eternal life, where we learn through the help of the Holy Spirit, to undo all of the hurt that we have endured for far too long. All the bitterness and hate that we feel towards ourselves or others who have harmed us, can be unburdened at the foot of the cross, with the Holy Spirit as guide. We can leave all our hurt behind and look forward to a new expression of life through Jesus who has the power to save us from ourselves."

What a glorious life it will be, when we truly know we are set free from our human frailty, anchoring our lives in the here and now, gaining our inheritance as sons and daughters of the living God. There is a purpose to your life which you are free to live today. Whatever you are having to endure, God is right there with you. You may not get the answer you were looking for but you will still get an answer, even if it is no. You may not even receive a sign that the answer is no but it is clear with the passage of time, that you may need to learn to live with the situation you are experiencing, despite how you might feel about it, giving glory to God for the privilege of being able to honour him in spite of what we might naturally think or feel.

In this, we learn to esteem our saviour and in return, he lifts us up in the throne room of grace to declare to our heavenly Father that we are co heirs in Jesus' inheritance who clothes us in his righteousness. The stain of our sin is gone and we can stand complete.