My childhood treasure chest

You know how children do really stupid things sometimes? Like, for example, the exact opposite of what they are told. Well, I was a child once (yeah, go figure!), and I did some things I wasn’t supposed to. One of those things was opening those little bags that come in the box when you buy new shoes, you know those things designed to keep them dry (called silica gel). I was curious, I wanted to know what they looked like! As it turns out, they are kind of pretty to look at, so I started collecting them. I got my hands on every single package I could find, and since I wasn’t eating them or throwing them on the floor or anything, I guess my parents didn’t see the harm in it (it’s also possible they had no idea what I was doing, until I had a neat little collection), so it quickly became a house rule that all those little packages should go to me.

I kept them in this little ‘treasure chest’, and I had different colors and sizes, I had some that had been subjected to moisture (which turned them yellowish), some that were round and some that looked like they had been a part of something bigger and had been broken into pieces – I had a lot of different ones, and I basically had a lot of them. I even added some rose thorns when I was a teenager to make it look edgier.

They literally served no purpose except for the fun of adding more and the trouble of keeping them in the box when moving. I still remember when the bottom of the box was barely covered, and now there’s no more room there. I must have spent somewhere between 10 and 15 years collecting these things, and now it’s my brother’s turn (though he cheats, he gets the big industrial packs from his work, so in his first batch he got more than I have in my entire collection).

I know this might seem like a fun but pointless little anecdote, and for many years I suppose it was completely useless. Then a year or two ago we got this little note at the Christmas service in our church (it’s tradition there, getting a little note or bookmark or something at Christmas). That year it read ‘You are a treasure’, and that little note is now standing next to my childhood treasure (or was, it seemed to have fallen down behind the couch). You see, on the surface, my treasure had no value what so ever, you couldn’t even reuse the little pearls since I had taken them out of their packages. The same way, the value of a human being, when estimated with earthly eyes, will either be the price of the chemicals we’re made up off (roughly 160$), or the amount of money we can make throughout our lives. Either way, pretty worthless (since money in itself is pretty worthless). The only value my treasure had was the value I assigned it, and I decided it was worth saving, collecting, displaying, showing off to my friends, and even the trouble of packing it up and bringing it with me when I moved out. In the same way, humans only have the value God decided to we should have. In our selves, we are worthless, in God, we are precious because he decided we are. And, much like the differences in my collection was what made it beautiful, it is our differences, diversities, and uniqueness that make us interesting and beautiful.

I have struggled with low self-esteem most of my life, I have real trouble seeing why anyone would think I’m worth anything, so getting this card at Christmas, and realizing the connecting to my childhood collection, it was kind of like hearing God tell me all through my life that I was precious. Life with God is funny like that, kind of like bad cell service – God can say things a million times, but sometimes we’re in a place in our lives where we just can’t hear it, like we have bad service. The thing about this is that I wouldn’t have believed him if he’d simply told me he loves me, but because he spent years creating this build-up, the message was that much harder to simply brush off. Because of the personal relationship, I had to this treasure I had spent so many years on, I had a better understanding of what he was talking about, it was less abstract and less flimsy.

I still don’t know if I quite believe him when he tells me I am precious (it’s so much easier to just reply ‘Actually, I was never in the Lord of the Rings, you must be thinking about someone else’), but I’ve at least come so far as to believe that he believes it. That, of course, creates a paradox in its own, cause if I believe in an almighty and all-knowing God, doesn’t that also mean that he can’t be wrong? If he says I’m precious, then either I am precious, or I’m delusional and the God I believe in doesn’t exist. I like to think that somewhere down the road, I might actually believe him, but it’s going to take time to fully accept that – which is why it is so amazing to know that God is playing the long game.

Oh, and by the way, this all goes for you too. You are precious in God’s eyes, whether that is easy for you to accept or hard to come to terms with. I mean, he gave his only son for you.