Years ago, when I was a teenager, my dad thought that, in the interests of character building, it would be good for me to work in the tobacco fields, just as he had done as a young man. Although I didn’t know what was involved, I felt I didn’t have much choice in the matter, so I prepared to undertake the work. It ended up consisting of 54 hours a week of hard labor, under a tent with very hot temperatures, and in what probably anyone would consider dirty working conditions.
As a young man I was incapable of judging whether the compensation was fair. However, I did feel a conviction that my view of myself was different from that of my employer. This got me thinking about my true value as a person. It was apparent to me that others, such as my employer, placed a different, lesser value on me than I did.
Over the years I took away a variety of lessons from that experience. I have looked back on it since through a metaphysical lens, and I have gained helpful insight regarding the meaning of our true value. Merriam Webster’s dictionary provides one meaning of value as “relative worth, utility or importance.” To me, that definition seems to make one’s value to be at the mercy of a very subjective evaluation, involving one’s own or another’s perceptions and assessments of individual character—perceptions that may be wrong or inconsistent.
For instance, a person who is challenged with low self-esteem may place a much lower value on his or her self-worth than may another individual who is not judging that person from the standpoint of low self-esteem. But here one’s value is merely humanly circumscribed. It is grounded on an individual perception, not necessarily on truth.
In Christian Science, however, intelligence is defined as residing exclusively with God, divine Mind. The so-called human mind, or mortal mind as Mary Baker Eddy refers to it, is an impostor, a counterfeit of the divine Mind. The counterfeit, having absolutely no reality, is incapable of expressing intelligence, and, in fact, it has no voice with which to do so. Yet this impostor is constantly attempting to inform us of the relative worth, utility, or value of persons and things, including ourselves, when only divine Mind can accurately assess our worthiness. A question for each of us, then, is whether we are buying into the suggestions of something incapable of communicating truth.
Fortunately, we can exercise our divinely bestowed prerogative to reject anything and everything that is not coming from God, and to affirm and accept what is.
God regards each of us as having the exact same worth, utility, and importance.
The book of Acts provides wonderful guidance in assessing our true value. It says, “God is no respecter of persons” (10:34). And Mary Baker Eddy, in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, defines man in part as “[reflecting] spiritually all that belongs to his Maker” (p. 475). Both of these statements describe our true value. Combined, they speak of God regarding each one of us in the exact same way—that is, as God views Himself: totally perfect. God is constantly expressing Himself through each one of us. This is not to say that we are each exactly the same, but that each of us is a complete expression of God manifested in different and distinct ways. But, though we each have a unique individuality, God loves and values us equally. Regardless of how we may be categorized by mortal mind, the reality is that God regards each of us as having the exact same worth, utility, and importance.
Further confirmation of the love God has for each of us is found in the parable that Jesus told of the lost sheep (see Luke 15:3–7). In that story, a man has 100 sheep, but one of them becomes lost. The shepherd then leaves the 99 sheep and searches for the lost one. When he locates it, he lays the sheep on his shoulders and carries it back to the remaining 99 sheep. What unconditional love and compassion from the shepherd! He clearly placed great value on each one of his sheep. That is precisely how much God regards and values each of us.
Jesus instructs us that the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves (see Matthew 22:39). For me, that statement is a requirement to love myself as God loves me, and to regard everyone else in exactly the same manner. God is expressing Himself as every idea in the universe. Therefore, it is incumbent for each of us to love and value every person, flower, and all else, the way God does, as having, throughout eternity, inestimable value.
