Being the BelovedRead Time 9 min

Referencing Gaudium et Spes (a document of Vatican II), St. John Paul II said, “Man cannot fully find himself, except through a sincere gift of himself.” I have been thinking about this a lot lately. More specifically, it struck me in prayer recently that in order to make a gift of myself, I have to be willing to see myself as a gift.

The idea that insecurity and low self-worth are impediments to loving well is something I only really learned in my early 20s. Prior to that, I had always assumed that my insecurity was only hurting myself. Living in intentional community has a way of forcing you to come face to face with your weaknesses. During my time as a campus missionary, I lived in intentional community with my teammates, and it finally became clear to me that my insecurities impacted and even damaged the way I interacted with the people I loved. My insecurity drained my attention and put up defensive walls that I did not know how to take down. Insecurity is something I still have to fight against. But naming the problem was a very real step toward healing.

If I don’t see myself as a gift worth receiving, why would I offer that gift to anyone? Even if I do manage to give of myself, that act will be tangled up with the grasping attempts to get people to like me, rather than being a simple offering.

Seeing myself as a gift has to be rooted in the reality of who I am: a beloved daughter of the Father. If my identity is rooted in anything else, the way I love will get skewed. Either I will see myself as unworthy and fail to offer myself as a gift, or I will see my worth as something I earned and slip into a sense of superiority and condescension.

Our whole life as Christians is built on the command to love. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

Embedded in this commandment is a subtle exhortation to healthy self-worth. If we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, it follows that we also must love ourselves. To love is to will the good. So loving yourself does not mean being selfish, satisfying your every craving or thinking of yourself as more important than the people around you. But it does mean choosing the things that are good for your holiness and for your human flourishing. Healthy self-worth means taking your identity from the truth of who you are: seeing yourself the way that God sees you. God, who is love, is also all-powerful and all-knowing. He created you on purpose because of his inexpressible love for you. And that means you can approach the world with a radical security: the knowledge that you are completely loved exactly as you are.

I want to be clear that if you, like me, struggle with feelings of low self-worth or even self-hatred, that does not mean that you are incapable of love. Every effort we make toward the good matters immensely. It changes us and the world for good. But finding healing and learning to live from our true identity as a beloved child of the Father will open our hearts and lead to being able to love better and more fully.

Of course, healing is more easily said than done. It looks different for everyone. But just naming the problem can be a very real step forward. Another simple beginning step is to name and renounce the specific lies you believe about yourself and announce the truths that you are trying to learn. So, for example, you might pray, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I renounce the lie that I am unlovable and announce the truth that God loves me more than I can begin to understand.” For some people, therapy might be necessary to find a deep healing. For others, a healthy prayer life might be enough.

Whatever healing looks like, living from our true identity as beloved will help us to love better. Receiving the love of God will make us able to give that love to those around us. You can’t give what you don’t have. If I want to love well, I must learn to receive the love of God well.

I think it is so beautiful that the Evangelist John refers to himself in his Gospel as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” All of us can call ourselves “the disciple whom Jesus loved” just as much as he can, but most of us never remember to. Most of us, whether through ignorance or self-doubt or forgetfulness or whatever else it may be, neglect the truth that the center of our identity is “beloved.” John embraced that truth as the core of his identity, and we call him the beloved disciple. We have to remember that all it took for him to be the beloved disciple was just to embrace the love that was already there. God’s love is always there, waiting for me, ready to remind me that I am the beloved. I just have to say yes.

Henri Nouwen said, “Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.”