Understanding our worth as single parents is essential because it shapes how we navigate every single aspect of our life, from the way we see ourselves to the relationships that we build. When we don’t recognize our worth, it can lead to self-doubt, unhealthy boundaries and feelings of isolation. Going through the suffering and difficult times that we do as a single parent, it can actually erode and we begin to question our value and worth. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the flip is that suffering actually builds our self-worth?
I’m really excited that we have Jamie Winship to help lead us through this. He has decades of experience bringing peaceful solutions to some of the world’s highest conflict areas. After a distinguished law enforcement career in the metro DC area, he worked in high-conflict areas in the Middle East for almost three decades. He’s worked with leaders in professional sports, business education, etc. and he and his wife now are co-founders of Identity Exchange, which helps individuals and teams discover new levels of creativity and creativity and resilience within the framework of true identity. He’s the author of one of our favorite books here at Solo Parent called “Living Fearless: Exchanging the Lies of the World for the Liberating Truth of God.” He was a podcast guest back in August, and it’s not a prerequisite for this conversation, but definitely go listen to it when you have time.
So as we talk about worth, let’s start with this. What would you consider and where does it come from?
In our vernacular, in our culture, in our worldview, worth has to do with measurement of value instead of the weight. And so the value of something is measured in its weight, not in how much it costs or what you can get for it. It’s what its weight is. It’s what its value is. And so for me, worth is not something that you measure. It’s your identity as a gift to the world. What is my value or my worth is what I’m giving to the world. If I’m with a person and they say, “Hey, our relationship has great value,” to me that’s what they’re saying. It’s not like you’re better than someone else. It’s like our identities together brings greater weight to who we are and our relationship, like gold. We just added wheat to that gold. I love that and that beauty. It’s immeasurable. We know the fruit of the spirit are the immeasurables and we have to move away from the measurables. When we get into the measurables, we lose track of all of the beauty of all of it. So then we compare and measure and all that stuff. But it’s the immeasurables. It’s like if I was sitting and talking to you guys like I am now, then the conversation to me, has weight, has value, it has worth. Is it better than any other conversation I’ve had? I wouldn’t even compare it. It doesn’t compare your unique special identities and I want to feel the weight of the relationship with you.
It almost feels like there was a while where I felt like I had to convince myself that I had worth or that I brought value or that sort of thing. And what I found over time, bringing myself up out of the muck and mire of becoming a single parent and going through all the things I went through, was exactly what you’re talking about. It was in those relationships and through having and developing healthy relationships with people like Robert or Amber. There’ve been plenty of others who have not only shown me my worth but also built worth together.
So if someone’s at their lowest point, which we know so many single parents are, they’re in the depths of it and they’re feeling like they don’t have self-worth, just bottom of the barrel situation happening, what would be the first thing or what would be something that would help bring them out of that and help them to understand their worth even at a micro level?
To me it’s to serve someone else. Go serve someone else at whatever level. It’s an AA principle too. If you’re going to fail, if you’re in your own head and can’t get out, go serve someone because as soon as you serve another person, you’re demonstrating the value that you are. Because the value of you has just been shared with another human, especially if they don’t request it. And that’s showing this is the reality of who you are. The titles, the names like “single parent” or “divorced person,” or whatever, they’re words that devalue because they’re identities that aren’t true. There’s no value to them. So to call a person any of those types of names can be to devalue. So for example, if you’re going to go around and say, “I’m an alcoholic” and that title devalues, that is not my identity. What you do want to do is confess if you want the truth out. But the Lord would never introduce me as an alcoholic. We’ve talked about this before. So when I went through that whole process, it was “my name” + “I am allergic to alcohol.” A person allergic to peanuts can never ever eat a peanut. It’ll kill. That’s me. That’s alcohol. But it’s not my identity. It’s a condition that I have to pay attention to. It does nothing to add or take away value to me. It’s just a condition. When you’re struggling, you have to say to yourself, “Stop acting like an alcoholic.” That’s what you’re doing. You’re acting like that is an identity and that robs and steals the weight of who you actually are. It kind of makes you anorexic in a way. You start to wither under the devaluing title and you lose weight. And so when you go out and serve someone, you realize, “I have some weight, I have some value.” And now you’re back in what’s true. Once you’re back in what’s true, you can move away from the lie that you have no value. How does a human lose value? This is interesting. If I went to God and said, “How have I lost my value?” He would say, “You can’t lose value.” That’s the whole lie—somehow you’ve lost value, lost worth. That’s impossible. And so in counseling, and when we’re praying with people they’ll say they feel like they’ve lost value, and we’ll ask them to tell us how they’ve lost value. And they’ll do it. And I’ll say, “Okay, where do you see Jesus in that?” And they’ll say, “I don’t see him.” I’ll say, “Because he can’t be in what’s false. You didn’t lose value. Ask him what actually happened there. And I’ll promise you one thing that didn’t happen there is that you lost value. That never happened. So let’s stop letting that memory from accusing you.” Or 1 John says if your hearts condemn you, then you need to come back to the real love (God), because that condemnation is not correct.
When you get in a relationship with people who are actually present and in a healthy spot, it’s almost like you uncover worth. It’s not a discovery thing; often it’s like a reflection. When you’re in relationship with God or others, you start uncovering a sense of worth because of the weight that you’re showing up with, that you’ve either forgotten or you’ve lied to yourself.
So how do we practically get past some of those lies that we’ve been telling ourselves?
I had a successful career in the music industry that if you measure it by the world’s standards, and when I lost all that, it was hard. I stepped out of my job, my wife left me. Everything collapsed at the same time and challenged everything I believed about myself. And it swung to the opposite side: “You are all failure.” All these lies about how I’m awful. What I’m saying is I see lies on both sides. Either you’re propping yourself up by comparison to other people by measuring yourself by what the world says. Or you go to the other extreme and just think that it’s all bad. How do we get past the lies that we tell ourselves?
We have a similar situation in that we put a lot of value or worth in our titles at work. But I also think there are a lot of people like me out there who put their value or worth in what their now ex-spouse had to say about them. And all of a sudden, this person has turned against you. They have nothing but horrible things to say. And that value was propped up. And so it’s almost like while I was able to uncover worthwith healthy people like Robert and Amber, relationships can also turn on you. Where if you’ve put your self-worth in that and you no longer have that, then where are you?
So what you want to look at is the lie over all of those scenarios. The truth is you have inherent value and worth; it doesn’t increase and it’s also not going to decrease. You’ll discover more and more the depth of your value and worth and you’ll look in the mirror and be like, “This is ‘Love your neighbor’ in the same way that you love yourself because you love what God did when he made you.” And the more you realize “this is what you did when you made me,” and you explore the reality and the truth of it, you realize it’s immeasurable. It’s like, “I could walk through this. I can come up with that. I can survive that. Oh my goodness, Lord, thank you.” It makes you love God and love what he did when he made you. But it also allows you to see the value and worth in other people.
The more you understand your own depth and worth in spite of all of our mess, the more you can look at another person and go, “Not only do I see it, I’m looking for it in you. I want to find it in you.” One thing I love saying to the people I work with on a daily basis is “I’m just so glad I know you and that I get the chance to work with you.” And I’m saying that from the depth of my heart. And what’s interesting is they don’t know why you’re so glad. But we’re going to learn why because this is why God is so glad. There’s the beautiful passage where Abraham is going to have a son and his body’s dead and Sarah’s body’s dead. And in Romans when Paul’s talking about it, he says, “In faith, in hope against hope, Abraham believed God.” What Abraham believes is not what he believes about man. He believes what God believes about him. And that’s credited to him as being righteous. So it’s the mirror. You’re looking into the mirror of God, not the mirror of a spouse who left or the mirror of a job or the mirror of success and numbers. You’re looking into the mirror of the one who created you and seeing what he sees when he sees you, which is astounding.
We want to have the faith in God that he has in us. He’s not like, “Jamie, you better have more faith in me.” He’s like, “You need to understand the depth of faith I have in you.” That’s what he keeps saying to me. Do you see, it’s not on ourselves to try and drum it up. We can’t do it. It’s too hard. There’s too much stuff that happens to us and we can’t just keep propping ourselves up. But at the same time, a person, a job can’t give me value. A person can’t take away value from us no matter what they say, what they do, whether they stay, whether they go. They can’t take worth away from us. We can act like they did, but that no one has that power. No one, Satan doesn’t have that power and God could, but he is the one that fills us with the worth. So it’s critical to identify the lies that we’ve been receiving. It’s the most critical because you know where this is coming from, and also to kind of let you off the hook. You learned this stuff. You aren’t making this up. You were taught to think this way. You were taught, especially in our Western Christian tradition, that if you don’t have a marriage that’s right, something’s wrong with you and you basically will never recover from it. I remember working for a certain organization and they would not let a person who was divorced lead, but they would let them serve. They would let them serve into the ground, but they weren’t allowed to lead. I went to the leadership and said, “Do you know what you’re affirming the lies of the enemy? You’re telling them they have a little bit of worth and we’re going to use it as much as we can, but you don’t have this much worth, which means they’re not worthy, period. That’s all that comes across as.” And we’re saying this as a denomination, and it’s a lie. That’s false, but it’s a very religious lie. It can be a very religious lie that’s hard to navigate. And that’s why you don’t get your value and worth from a religion, a church, a denomination, a human, a job, nowhere—only from God. He gave it to you and you will never lose it. You will never lose it. You only believe that you’ve lost it. And so you want to go,”Where’s the place that I lost it? What incident happened where I believed that it was stolen or taken?” Get there, get in that place with Christ, the one who gives value, and walk through it and say, “This is what I believe happened here. Tell me the truth. What happened? What happened in that place?” And the truth of the situation will come clear and God will mirror back to you what he believes about you. That’s the beauty. He will say, “Look into my eyes. This is who you are. Look at me. This is who you are.” And we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author perfecter of our faith.
We were talking before we hit record about the Bema podcast, and in one of the first episodes, Marty (the host) explains how scripture is living and breathing. We’ve all heard that, but in our western culture, it’s all about truth and lies and black and white. There’s no gray. Once we know the truth, we move on. And that’s it. Kill the mystery. End of case, end of story. But what’s beautiful and true in the Hebrew culture is that it’s more of always uncovering truth. It is living and breathing. And so you’re just constantly moving through that knowing that you’re never going to have the final answer. We can shift our focus to truth and understanding that truth is always going to be unfolding, which also means that our worth is insurmountable. We can’t fathom the depths of our worth. We will always be uncovering it and understand that it’s a never-ending process. We don’t reach a destination, but it’s something to explore: What am I going to find out about myself today? How much more worthy am I going to feel today because I’ve uncovered more truth?
When people are struggling with some sort of sin, my first question is, “Do you have nothing else to do?” That takes a lot of time and effort to stay in that lie. You’ve got to be fairly committed to believing that and keep going into the darkness of it. Don’t you understand the journey of discovering the truth of who you are, which is an endless, amazing, incredible journey? If you understood that you wouldn’t have time for this. This would become so unimportant to you. There’s a translation of the Lord’s Prayer where “lead us not into temptation” is “protect us from falling back into the comparative performance-based life.” It’s always a temptation to start measuring yourself. And so then what happens in your life? The temptation is to think, “Oh, now I’m back at zero.” Oh no, you just fell at a much higher level because the lie never stops. But as you grow, new layers emerge because you’re getting more and more advanced in how you understand yourself, God, and other people. You push harder into it and the enemy pushes harder back against you until—and this is something we said earlier that I wanted to make sure we got to is when we use the word “loss” like we lost something or “I lost my family,” I always say to people, “Let’s ask God if you lost anything. Did you really lose anything? Because I don’t think you did.” So what do we mean with God? God doesn’t lose things. He doesn’t lose. So that’s another word that we’ve been taught because we’re in this win-lose worldview. And that didn’t work.
I was this lady whose husband was diagnosed with something horrible and only had two weeks to live. I didn’t know her. Someone called me and said, “Hey, she asked if you would call her.” So I call her, and she’s sitting on the bed next to her husband. They’re in their eighties, been married 70 years, and she’s crying and I can hear him breathing next to her in the bed. What am I going to say to these people? What is there to say? So I asked her, “What are you afraid of?” And she said, “I’m afraid of what I’m going to lose.” And I said, “What are you going to lose?” And she said, “My husband” and I said, “Is that what’s going to happen? What does that mean? You’re going to lose him? Does it mean he’s going away and you’re going to see him later? That’s not losing. Let’s ask Jesus what you’re going to lose.” So we prayed together about that, and she asked, “Lord, am I losing anything?” He said, “You’re not losing anything you can’t lose.” There is no losing, but you can believe you’re losing. And if you believe you’re losing, you’ll act like a loser or someone who’s lost. So whenever you’re in a situation where there’s failure involved, we have to be careful because the enemy’s quick to say, “Well, look what you lost. You lost this, this, this, and this.” My question to the Lord is, “What did I lose that I’ll never have back again?” These are the lies.We still feel like we lost something and can’t get it back. It goes back to measurement, right? When you think about labs. And that we’re a victim of time, that time’s going to run out and God’s going to run out of time. We’re going to run out of time. And there’s nothing anybody can do about it. None of it’s true. I mean, Bema really gets deep into that kind of thing. That’s why it’s a great podcast because in the Hebraic worldview that is not the case. It is never the case. That’s a very Greek-hellenistic view of things.
One thing that’s really changed for me in the journey of the podcast, is just understanding this unfolding truth and the mystery of it all. And you said earlier, before we started recording, that it took people busting your jar. And I have been so afraid of someone breaking my jar where I built my security. It’s all within this jar. One of the benefits of going through something really difficult like becoming a single parent, is that that jar gets shattered. And that is actually an opportunity, but it doesn’t have anything to do with measurement. Jesus learned obedience to hear and respond. Jesus learned to hear and respond through what he suffered. That’s what Hebrews says. He’s learning to hear and respond to the Father through what he suffers. And the only shortcut to maturity and the walk with God is suffering. So to avoid suffering is a mistake. What you want to do in suffering is what Jesus did. In Hebrews 5, he’s crying out with loud tears to the one who’s able to deliver him up and out of death because he feared being separated from the bright presence of the glory of God. That’s what he’s praying about in Gethsemane. It is a very deep challenge that he’s facing in his humanity. His question is, “Can the sin of the world actually break the Trinity apart?” That’s what he was afraid of. That idea in his humanity was horrifying. And then one of the early church fathers said fear of the Lord would make you not afraid of anything. In other words, if you had the same fear that Jesus had, you would never be afraid of anything. His only fear was to be separated, not from a person, not from the disciples, not from the people he loved, from the presence of God. That’s what he was. The relationships were already breaking down. They were already falling apart. He was betrayed, denied. All those are already happening. That didn’t scare him because he knows there’s restoration to all of that. The relationship he’s having a difficulty with is the one with the Trinity. And can the sin of the world split—will the Father actually break away? I mean, he couldn’t even fathom the possibility of it. And of course we teach that did happen, which is horrifying. To think that as a human being, that God would actually turn his back on anybody is a nearly unbelievable concept. Once you believe that you’re in trouble, once you think that God will turn his back at a certain point, you’re in big trouble in life.
So when Jesus is praying that prayer, he is suffering through it, he’s embracing the suffering. He’s going into it. He’s not trying to avoid it, and he says, “Is there another way to do it?” But this is his breakthrough statement: “Not my will. Your will be done.” As soon as he says that it’s a victory all around. Satan’s like, “Shoot.” That’s a done deal now because he’s not going to separate. So when the suffering comes, the question to God is, “What do you want me to know? And what do you want me to do as I embrace the suffering so that it can bring a greater depth of me in relationship to you. If you embrace suffering that way, it takes away the fear. It may not take away the pain, but it’ll take away the fear of it. And it allows the suffering to become beautiful and redemptive, even though it’s terrible like the cross, right? When you go in and down into the darkness of it, it’s God’s power that raises it up, renewed, different. So I tell people all the time, no matter what you’re going through, if you just stay with the Lord in it, just hang on to him as deeply as you can, I promise you in time however bad this is, you’re going to be grateful for it one day, I’m telling you. Edith Eger is a Holocaust survivor. In her nineties, she said the Holocaust was the greatest spiritual experience of her life, and her mother was killed in front of her. She says, “You have the choice for that to be your worst nightmare or the greatest thing that ever happened to you in your life” because you have value and worth all the way through. And that will either be you starting to believe that in the suffering, you have no value, or you realizing that the suffering is revealing and exposing the deeper, greater weight of the value of who you really are in this process. It’s a refining fire. And when you come out of it, and you will, you’re going to be more beautiful than you’ve ever been before. The enemy has no power in that.
And that’s why we have such shallow Christian lives. I can stand up and say like a Pharisee, “This has never happened to me. I’ve never been involved in this situation.” That’s the sacrifice you’re making. Instead of saying to the Lord, “I want to walk with you through whatever.” And as a human, when you come into a relationship with another being, you have no power to control that relationship’s future.There’s this goofy idea we have that “Well, that person made a pledge.” And so when it doesn’t go the way we want, [there’s] all the condemnation and blame we pull out of it onto ourselves and the society dumps on the person. And especially if you happen to be a woman. When you’re coming into a relationship with another person, it is like you’re making a covenant. However, you cannot get your identity from that. It’s a mistake. Because when things go different than what you planned, if you’ve tied your worth and your identity to that relationship and that relationship breaks for whatever reason, then you lose your worth and identity in the process. And so that’s the lie that we have to constantly be aware of.
Recently, I was talking to someone who is a very devout Christian and she asked how I was doing. I said, “Things feel really heavy and sad right now. And I’m just carrying a lot of sadness. I lost a neighbor to death and just the world, everything that’s going on.” And she said, “Well, you know what the Bible says about ‘Take my yoke upon you. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” And she said, “So obviously you’re not putting your burdens where they’re supposed to be.” Going back to glossing over suffering because I’m feeling the weight and the heaviness of the world; just because I’m sad because someone who lives next door to me passed away unexpectedly, does not mean that I’m not placing my burdens in the right place. I say that not to shame anyone who kind of has the go-to statement, but at the same time it’s like, “Man, just be the suffering together, be willing to go in deep and be willing to feel what you feel.”
Let me tell you what’s wrong about the idea that you just need to cast all your cares on him. It’s specific to the burden you’re carrying. When Jesus is up on the mountain crying over Jerusalem, God doesn’t go, “Just give me that burden.” He doesn’t say that. Or when he is weeping over Lazarus, it’s like, “Well, you obviously haven’t given your cares to God.” Sadness is a God emotion. When people come up to me and they’re crying, I always ask them, “Tell me why you’re crying. What’s the emotion that you feel while you’re crying?” And they’ll say, “Well, I don’t know.” And I say, “Well, are you sad? Is it sadness? Because if you’re sad, I’ll cry with you. Let’s just cry.” Because as Americans especially, we don’t know how to lament. God loves lament. We lamented when our team was killed in Iraq. Our Muslim neighbors came over and they demanded that we lament with them. We’re Americans, we don’t lament, we just get on with it. Or we do a pep rally on how we’re never going to let that happen again. And we’re going to do crowdfunding; we turn everything into a cause and what we need to do is get down and cry our eyes out over what has happened that God is sad about. If we don’t lament, then we can’t embrace the suffering fully.
We were having a team meeting and we just brought on a woman as our CFO. She’s very capable. She felt intimidated by some of the folks (and she listens to this, I hope she’ll appreciate it). And so just out of the beauty of her, and the weight of who she is, she said, “I just want to start this meeting by saying what I’m afraid of in this meeting.” This is laying down your burden. Only she’s going to do it in front of the group, which is beautiful and courageous. And so she says, “This is what I’m afraid of.” She’s emotional about it. She lays it down and it causes the whole group to follow suit with her. And then when we were done we all looked at her and said, “You have so much value here.” The very thing that she was afraid of—that she wasn’t good enough for the job and all that stuff—just by saying what she was afraid of, revealed the weight of who she is. And I said, “I’m going to fire everyone except you because nobody else did that.” We should be crying. There’s a lot of things in our country that we should be weeping about.
I feel like naturally what [sharing] does is uncover what you care about, what matters to you, which then leads you to your value, your identity, where you can serve, it just all comes together full circle. It’s unfolding. The Lord wants to show you how valuable you are. Not just to him, but he gave you as a gift to the world. That’s how valuable you are. You are a valuable gift to the world. And the enemy’s goal is that you either devalue yourself or never even understand your value. And it comes by measurement and accusation and that kind of thing.
We have Solo Parent groups around the country and online seven days a week, and it’s just a bunch of people who show up with our brokenness. There’s so much intimacy that happens when you show up and cry with someone or lament, and I marvel at how much Americans just don’t want to go there. We’re so frightened of it. But once you’ve tasted it and have felt some of the freedom and beauty that comes out of lament, I think it ties directly into worth. You are scrubbing yourself of all the things that you’re propping up … and it does present your worth in a way that you wouldn’t just by trying to say the right platitudes.
That’s why I love being in those kinds of groups. They’re truth tellers. That’s what lament does. It allows you to truth tell, and that’s why God doesn’t respond to complaining because that’s lying. Lament is truth telling. And God doesn’t like complainers, but does respond to lament. And so yeah, we need to cry. We need to tell the truth about how we view ourselves, how we view the world, all that stuff in order that God can come and comfort. Blessed are those who mourn for, I will comfort the ones who mourn. If you’re not mourning and not going to comfort, you can’t comfort because you won’t mourn.
As Americans, we don’t know how to lament and we’re so separated from the rest of the world and we can choose to be separated. I was watching a CBS Sunday morning where they were kind of doing a segment on [the attacks in Israel] and I just started weeping. Just out of nowhere. And I was like, “I can’t imagine being a mom whose child is a hostage and they haven’t seen or heard from them. They don’t know where they are. They don’t know if they’re alive.” And we can shelter ourselves in so many ways, and it’s almost unfair to ourselves. It’s unfair to the people around us that we aren’t able to share that with other people, to just sit in the lament and mourning and the heaviness of what’s happening around us.
I have a daughter-in-Law, a Palestinian from Gaza. Her family’s all there and they’ve all been killed. 250 of her family members have been killed—women. And she is in such lament, and for her, it’s never going to end. There is no way out for her. Family can’t leave. They’re not allowed to leave. They’re told to go to the safe space. A lot of them were killed in the safe zone. And this makes me lament because she’s like, “Why does the world not only not care about this, they think it’s good?” And she’s a writer for the New York Times and there was an article about the number of IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers who have committed suicide because of what they’ve been asked to do in Gaza. And this is the stuff we just ignore on both sides of it. Just the fact that the numbers of people that are being killed day after day after day—and where I live, some people are quite happy about it. And so it’s like we not only don’t know how to lament, we pick a side and cheer. And both sides are losing everything. Israel, because we worked for the Israelis and we know as Americans with special forces, our guys are killing themselves. 22 a day from Afghanistan and Iraq. Do you know what’s going to happen when you’ve killed 30,000 people in an area that small, as tiny as what Gaza is? I mean that’s killing people in a little fenced-in area. And the effect it has on the psychology and the woundedness, the soul wounding that’s going on of everyone involved and no side knows any way out of it. There’s no way out of it. It’s just going to continue forever. And where’s the value and worth in human beings there in that region? There is not. So we should be crying our eyes out over it and we don’t.
Lament is so tied into worth and value and if we’re not willing to step into that place of suffering, that place of lament, that place of brokenness, it’s going to be hard to scratch the surface of our worth because we’re not willing to go there. It goes hand in hand.
One of the biggest burdens that we carry as solo parents is we’re parenting alone. And sometimes we’re parenting in contrast to what the other home is doing. And so it can be a real difficult situation. We want our kids to have a good grasp on self-worth. How do we teach our kids about that? How do we teach them without it just being performance-based?
Community. Another disadvantage is if I wake up and the group that I find myself in (like solo parenting) is blamed for so much of what’s wrong in America. It’s like, “Single parent homes are what’s ruining in the whole place. If [there was] a mother and a father, none of this [would happen].” That accusation is so harsh and not true because what that is insinuating is that a kid can only understand value and worth if there’s a male and a female above them. I was a police officer. I know how they can ruin a kid. So these statements are so ridiculous and accusatory. And if I was in a group of single parents, I would just be telling them every day, “This is not an identity. You have value, you have worth, God doesn’t give identity to kids from parents. He gives identity to kids.” The parent’s job is to help that kid understand that identity and move in it. Do you need two people to do it? No. Do you need one person to do it? Actually, no. You need God to do it. So this is a weight that needs to be laid down. We can lament over brokenness and hurt and woundedness, but that does not all of a sudden pile responsibility on the person that stayed. God would never allow that to happen. If anything, they have greater grace. They’re probably better because of how dependent they are. We do a lot of work in professional sports, and believers talking about their mom, the reverence level is so high and they’re so grateful. Then the kid that had model Christian parents and grew up at the Christian school and made the team and made it into the pros—there’s a very different amount of humility and grace. When you talk about that one parent, those people cry. They’re so grateful. How valuable is that single parent beyond worth, beyond value because of what we learned sacrifice from that mom or that dad? Why? Because they didn’t have the normal and they had to work longer hours and they had to sacrifice more. And so that’s why, back to my question, what did you lose in that? Nothing. What did you gain? Oh wow. We haven’t really even thought about the level of gain.
I am sorry that especially our religious culture piles that on people. It’s not correct. You stepped into a hard place and you’re not going to quit. You’re not going to give up. We’re going to hang on. We’re going to move through this and it’s a win. Some of my most inspiring stories come from single parents—they make it through. I think you said a very key word, and that is understanding dependence and understanding our dependence on God. And not in a trite way, but just in a surrendered way.
Can you tell people where they can find you, your book, and find your resources?
At our website, identity exchange.com.
Takeaways
I’ve never heard it put this way that worth is a weight. And actually how we start uncovering or unfolding our worth in relationship when we start being known and that kind of thing. And I think that when you are feeling like everything’s really eroded, serve, go get in community; that is where you start regaining an understanding of worth, especially from a solo perspective—how suffering, how lament and going through these hard things is so directly tied to an understanding of our worth.
I really liked when he said the person coming up and crying at church and him asking, “Why are you sad?” or “Why are you crying?” and uncovering that. And it is how you find what you care about, how you find what matters to you, which directly ties to your identity and worth, and where you can actually go serve in those areas and be the antithesis of low self-worth. Because if you’re serving into the places that matter to you, then you’re able to find your worth and value in that and provide that to the world and to the people around you.
Listener Question
In my extended family, things can get heated regarding politics and even just simply having different worldviews. With Thanksgiving and big family gatherings approaching, how can I do my part in keeping the dinner conversation positive without skewing into ugliness?
I think it’s just trying to just avoid those conversations and also picking your battles. Some things are just not worth some things. I have people that I love dearly that have such different views on politics and there’s so many things that are divisive right now, and we don’t have to make our opinions known all the time. Don’t feel like you have to react. Don’t feel like you have to contribute.
John Delony, who we’ve had on the podcast before, talks about how he preemptively tells his family or whoever he’s going to be with at the holidays, what is off limits. If you engage in these conversations, we’re going to have to leave or you’re going to have to leave if they’re in your house or whatever. Just saying, “I’m not willing to get into these conversations.” And I’ve done that with my family because we have a variety of viewpoints in my family and some are really crazy off the wall and some are sound—it just runs the gamut with my family. And so it’s really easy to step into the fire if you are looking for a fight. I’ve said, “Hey, we’re not talking politics this year. We’re not going there. We’re not talking about whatever it is.” And what Jamie said, when you need to lay down a burden versus something to lament together. Because at the end of the day, there is sadness. And so where can you find the common ground to lament together to understand the heaviness and the weight of the things that we can’t control? And that anger is us just trying to control it.
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