One of Nancy's favorite catch-phrases is "Who is better than me?"    (Strictly speaking, the phrase should be "Who is better than I am?", but we're not strictly speaking!)   Nancy's strong sense self-worth, which took a battering when she was a teenager as her parent's were divorcing, is one of her most attractive qualities.  Our boys have clearly benefited from having a mother who is so self-assured, and I think that is the secret to Nancy's confidence in advocating and negotiating so effectively on behalf of our family.   She is quick to note that the phrase doesn't mean that she is better than you or I.   It simply means that from her perspective, she is the best and she would like nothing better than for you to also say without blushing as a mantra of self-esteem Who is better than me?   

     My self-esteem was flaccid when I was in grade school.  As I did more and experienced more and achieved and failed and then achieved some more, my self-esteem grew.   I think my self-esteem was also retarded by a theology that stressed our sinful nature, that we were conceived in iniquity, born in sin, and all we like sheep have gone astray and will continue to do so.   There was the conflation of self-esteem with pride, the former having to do with a clear self-appraisal and the latter having to do with attaching excessive significance to status and achievements in comparison to others.  There are dangers to pride, and that pride can go before a fall.  False pride and any kind of boasting is a sign of low self-esteem rather than a healthy self-esteem, which merely set you up for manipulation by others.  On the other hand, I think there is both a distinction and a relationship between our spiritual well-being and our psychological well-being.   Damage to our self-worth damages us spiritually, although one can clearly have a strong self-esteem and can still be rotten to the core.   But the mere fact of original sin in no way erodes the prevailing fact that we are forever children of a King and ambassadors of His kingdom.   In the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15, the lost son said to his Dad "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in they sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son."  But the father embraced his son, assuring him that he was still is on, and had a party.  "It was fitting that we should make merry and be glad," the father said to his other son.  "For this, thy brother, was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found."  

    So many Christians in particular lack a sense of self-worth to the point of depression.  It is as if they have over internalized to their harm the hymn that God saves "a wretch like me."   My thoughts when I hear "Amazing Grace" is that while I've done bad things in my life, I'm far from wretched.  So perhaps it is worth asking: why do we matter? 

      All theology is, I think, a restatement of this song from our nursery days:

Jesus loves me this I know

For the Bible tells me so

Little ones to Him belong

For I am weak but He is strong

But what does the Bible tells us and why is there warrant it that?

       We matter because we were made whole.  Genesis 1:27-28:  “God created man in His own image, and in the mage of God created He him: male and female created He them.  And God blessed them.”

        We matter because Jesus died for us:

They stretch Him on a cross to die,

Our Lord who first stretched out the sky.

Whose countenance the cherubim dare not gaze on,

They spat on Him. 

He prays for them “Father Forgive.”

For He was born so that all might live.

   We matter because God has promised us peace of mind in the storms of life, the peace, as Pascal writes, of “being in a storm-tossed ship and knowing that it will not sink.”

     “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.  Let not your heart be troubled.”  John 14:27

     “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”  Romans 8:1

     “The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”   Philippians 4:7

      The Bible has a word of advice for all people who feel sad and alone.  The word is: Rejoice.  “Rejoice in the Lord always,” said Paul under more difficult circumstances than we face today.  “Again I say rejoice.”  That we matter is indeed warrant for the joy that cannot be dampened under any circumstances.  Lift up your hearts.  Be joyful.  Be thankful.  That advice is just as relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago.  If we can accept nothing more about Christianity, I ask you to accept the proposition that you matter.  For the jump from “I am” to “God is” isn’t nearly as great as the chasm that separates “I am nothing” to “I am someone.”      

     So how can we believe that we matter when we believe that we don’t matter?  We do it by believing the affirmation of others, by seeking supportive relationships, but letting go of the negatives of life, by accepting our limits, by daring to say yes and by daring to say no, by closing some doors and knocking on other doors, and by treating ourselves kindly and gently.  

        A healthy self-esteem manifests itself in awareness of and love for others.  Our personality is a blade that can either heal or kill.  Oscar Wilde’s melodrama The Picture of Dorian Gray portrays the depravity of Dorian that was reflected in his painting but not in himself.    Dorian surrenders his soul to be young.  But it is the painting that corrodes with viciousness even as he retains his youth.  And so as we look at the mirror, we see an image—but what is in and behind that image?   Are we unaffected by pain, as Dorian was when his girlfriend Sibyl Vane killed herself?   The outer world—what we falsely call the real world—is not nearly as dark and foreboding as our inner world.  It’s this world of impulses and feelings that I write about in this section.  We’re like spiders at the center of the web of existence, but it ought not to be for narcissistic reasons that we look inward.  Rather, we do so that we can penetrate the consciousness of others.  Like the surgeon who sees the skull behind the face, we must be able to perceive the soul behind the artifice.  By understanding and mastering the forces that compel men and women to act as they do, we can through will or sometimes charm get what can not be achieved in ignorance. 

          From the 5th through the 12th grade, I was at a boarding home for missionary kids in Pennsylvania.  Perhaps because they were former missionaries themselves, the first set of foster parents were exemplary.  The second set were a young couple who came out of Arizona’s juvenile delinquency system.  Suffice it to say that proof that they were in the wrong job was confirmed years later in the suicide of my foster mother, not privately and painlessly but publicly and painfully.

        “I must admit that I found your conclusion that Josie’s suicide confirmed her unfitness for the parenting role a bit harsh to take,” my sister-in-law Joyce Wik writes.  “Remember that Josie was on quite a bit of pain medication as a result of a car accident that had left her with permanent injuries. Who knows how that medicine affected her emotional and chemical balance?            

        “All my interactions with her were very positive.  Of course, I was relating as one adult to another.  She and I were not that far apart in age.  The Ivyland alumni that came to her home obviously loved her fiercely.

        “On the other hand, I did observe a somewhat adversarial feeling about the missionary parents.  More than once she made comments that reflected her belief that the parents were wrong to ‘abandon’ their children.  Perhaps some of that was communicated to the children too.”  

         In a letter from 1984, Joyce wrote that “a visit with the Reuters is always pleasant.  They are still struggling financially.  I wonder if they’ll ever really get on their feet.  Josie has a permanent limp since the car accident two years ago.  But they seem happy.”   And so we continue to peal the onion looking for answers that elude us.  

       Just after I moved into my house in Lake in the Hills in 1990, I wrote that “the lake stretches in from of me like a huge backwards “C”.  The apple tree is starting to blossom and most ice has gone.  From my living room window, I can see on the peninsula the house in which a twenty year-old girl shot herself last week, two houses from mine.  So there is pain even while surrounded by beauty.” 

       Here are two all too typical news clippings.

       “Sitting on a bed of oak leaves in the woods behind school, Melissa and her twelve year old cousin finished their picnic lunch and swallowed the last of their wine.  Twelve minutes before noon, a tiny white fleck of light appeared far down the railroad tracks.  Ten seconds later, the crescendo of engines going 100 miles per hour.  Amtrak 141 was on time.  Melissa ran to the tracks, knelt between the rails, and clasped her hands in prayer.  Her cousin, Pearl, tried to stop her, but Melissa had always been bigger and stronger.  Melissa Courtney Putney made the sign of the cross.  On that warm Tuesday mid-day last week in rural Maryland, a troubled eighth grader died.”

       “Lynn Ann Miller, 13, an exceptionally bring but shy girl, worshipped television star Freddie Prinzie and kept his autographed picture of “Chico” close by her.  When Prinze committed suicide, firing a bullet through his brain, Lynn Ann made up her mind.  Three hours after Prinze was buried Monday, Lynn Ann took her father’s .38 caliber pistol while her parents were out of the house, put the gun to her right temple, and pulled the trigger.” 

       One year after I graduated, Donald Wilkerson ’77,a friend of mine and like me a missionary kid, lay down in front of a Chicago Western freight train at the Chase Street crossing in Wheaton after he broke up with his girlfriend.  “We were sad to hear of the death of your fellow student during your Wheaton College days,” my parents wrote to me. “It’s hard to imagine the depths of disappointment that this lad was suffering.  This tragedy need not have been.  No matter how big the disappointment or overwhelming the problem our God is bigger than all these.  He has provided a way of escape in the severest trial (I Corinthians 10:13) and we need not succumb to the lies and devices of the devil but should rather resist him.  In times of crisis and calamity, our minds focus on the calamity.  However, the Biblical corrective is to focus not on the problem but the problem solver: ‘Looking to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith’  (Hebrews 12:2).  Our hearts go out in sympathy to all those who are affected by this untimely incident.” 

       The pianist Arthur Rubinstein writes in his autobiography My Young Years a moment of despair when he tried to kill himself with a belt from a bathroom clothes hook.  He pushed the chair away, the belt tore apart, and Rubenstein fell crying to the floor with a crash. 

        “When one stops crying, the suffering subsides, the same as when laughter dies, the fun is gone.  And so, nature claiming its own, I began to feel hungry.  “This time I shall have two sausages,” I decided.

         “Out in the street, however, a sudden impulse made me stop.  Something strange came over me, call it a revelation or a vision.

         “I looked at everything around me with new eyes, as I had never seen any of it before.  The street, the trees, the houses, dogs chasing each other, and the men and women, all looked different, and the noise of the great city—I was fascinated by it all.  Life seems beautiful and worth living, even in prison or in a hospital, as long as you look at it that way.

         “I felt as if I had been reborn.

         “Well, on that night, right there in the street, on my way to Aschinger’s for my dinner de luxe, my brain was full of philosophical thoughts, and it resulted in a new conception of life and a new criterion of values, all for my private use.  Let me say only in this chaos of thoughts I discovered the secret of happiness and I still cherish it: Love life for better or for worse, without conditions.”  

        There are people who kill themselves in the grip of insanity, and my sympathy goes to them and those they leave behind.   Most people who commit suicide kills themselves quickly, but some die slowly, stunned over a long period of time by inertia.  But I do strongly believe that if we’re cogent, we should never take our lives for any reason.  I speak from experience when I say that suicide leaves a wake of grief that stretches decades.  I don’t deny the complexity of reasons for suicide.  I think it’s simplistic to say that suicide is the product of a diseased mind.  But it appears that it is a combination of biological and psychological and sociological factors  produce an inimical feeling about existence itself—a need to stop unbearable anguish-- by doing to escape being.  There are answer—within us—from others—clergy, social workers, friends, psychologists, doctors—and also from our faith.  But I do believe that suicide in the main is an act of selfishness masquerading as desperation.  I believe that there are always options and there are always people that can provide us with options.  But destructive hate turned inward is never an option.

           William Buckley quotes in Execution Eve a last sermon by fifty-year old Charles Pinckey Luckey of the Middlebury Connecticut Congregational Church, perhaps one of the most moving credos of the Christian faith I’ve read.  Two weeks after he read this letter, he died, on January 20, 1976, of Jakob-Creutzfelds disease.   

         “What does the Christian do when he stands over the abyss of his own death and the doctors have told him that disease is ravaging his brain and that his whole personality may be warped, twisted, changed?  Then does the Christian have any right to self-destruction, especially when he knows that the changed personality may bring out some horrible beast in himself?

         “Well, after 48 hours of self-searching and study, it comes to me that ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view life as a gift from God, and every precious bit of life was not earned but was by grace, lovingly bestowed upon him by his Creator, and it is not his to pick up and smash.

          “And so I find the position of suicide untenable, not because I lack the courage to blow out my brains, but rather because of my deep, abiding faith in the Creator who put the brains there in the first place.  And now the result is that I lie here blind on my bed and trusting in the sustaining, loving power of that great God who knew and loved me before I was fashioned in my mother’s womb. 

           “But I do not think it is wrong to pray for an early release from this diseased, ravaged carcass.  Loving given to my congregation and to my friends if it seems in good taste” 

         “Three months ago, you came into our lives,” I wrote in my diary on May 24th, 1994.  “Today, you’re a pink-cheeked boy with big, brown eyes and a cooing smile. We want to give you the world.  But the world isn’t easy. Your peers will grow up in well-manicured neighborhoods, attend first-rate colleges, and flaunt the trappings of affluence.  But there’s trouble in paradise. Last month, two girls gassed themselves after a party in a suburb not far from here.  A local TV report documented a new fad among children called carving.  Kids use acid, blades, and fire to mutilate themselves.  We see young lives trashed by drug abuse, alcoholism, and depression. At the root of this lie a sickness of the soul called self-hate.  Self-hate tries to claim that I’m worthless, undesirable, bad.  And out of this soul death comes that most fundamental question of existence:

                                                         I.

                                                         Why?

To be or not to be, that is the question. What is the answer?  Beloved child, there’s nothing we want to give you more than a foundation of granite self-esteem that can stand the stresses of life.  “Give me a place to stand,” Archimedes said 2,000 years ago, “and I will move the world.”  We want you to stand on a place of unconditional self-acceptance.  We want you to accept yourself without condition, and thusly to accept others and life itself without condition. This we want you to know. You matter.  You’re special.  You’re wanted. Believe it.  Hold on to it.  Cling to it with the tenacity of a terrier.  Make it part of you. You are because you are.  Your existence needs no justification.  It’s not based on achievement, what you look like, what you wear, what your grades are.  You are—not because of what you do—but because you are. Dearest Zachary, here at home, you’re safe and free. Safe to have roots, free to have wings. Here you’re free to experiment, to make mistakes, to grow.  Here you’re free to be you. Zachary, we love you!”  

       The same, dearest Benjamin, is true for you as well!       

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