Curious FaithSample

The Value of a Masterpiece

Recently, I came across a Dove soap video produced in France that reduced me to tears. In the clip, women had been asked to record all of the thoughts that they had heard about themselves throughout the day in a journal. Dove then turned the women’s thoughts into a dialogue that played out in a street café within earshot of several other tables, including the original women who wrote the words in the journals.

“You have a big chest and short legs. Some women can make that work. But, you … you’ve got no charm. You’re just fat and ordinary. Every time you smile, those baby teeth you have, they make you look like a mouse. Sit straight up so your belly doesn’t look so big.”

People overhearing the conversation were horrified to hear the way that the women spoke to one another.

“That’s so violent, what you’re saying to her! You should stop. Your words are so unkind.” Strangers interrupted the horrendous exchange.

Upon the realization that the words being played out were their own, the women who had journaled the original thoughts were mortified.

“It’s so horrifying. I hope my daughter never speaks to herself like that,” one woman marveled.

I cried my way through the video, realizing that it wasn’t just those women, I do it too. So many of us do.Over and over we devalue ourselves. But, we cannot walk into our full potential in Christ when we believe that who He created us to be falls woefully short.

But we forget! How often do we all forget our value?! How often do we believe the lies of the world instead of the words of our Creator about us? We set aside the truth that Jesus came and lived and died to prove to us our value to the God of the Heavens. Even Dove soap sees our value. Our value lies inherent in a renowned creator. Yet still, call ugly what God calls a “masterpiece.” And then, we operate out of belief of those lies and lose capacity to follow curiously.

How we minimize that ultimate price paid when we insist that more is still due to redeem our messy lives. We make Satan’s job so simple. He plants one tiny lie somewhere along the way, and we take it from there all the way to our own crippling self destruction.

We all have them; the lies we believe. Yet we try to replace them with new ideas or things that we think will cover them. But, eventually, the new thing’s façade cracks and the old lie is still there … still digging deep into our beliefs about everything. Instead of moving forward in curiosity after God, we get stuck on lies about ourselves. It matters so much that we learn to uncover the lies. Let’s name them. Let’s call them out … Let’s just STOP believing them, and replace them instead with the truth of Christ.