Appreciating How We Are Made

We are stamped with the Maker’s Mark. Our bodies, minds and personalities have the design of God written all over them. For this we not only should accept, but never appropriately condemn. Appreciating how we’re made, and cherishing the very material of our unique individual humanity, is one of the highest forms of respect we can pay our Lord.

“I praise you [God], for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.”

~Psalm 139:14 (NRSV)

Love for the Lord commences there and continues on—to love for others. Could we truly love others without loving, indeed accepting, ourselves? No, we’d be too preoccupied in our concerns to be concerned about the affairs of others toward compassion.

Still there are matters about us, as we look deeply inward, if we dare, that we struggle to accept.

Appreciating Our Inherent Beauty

Right to the very bottom of the barrel we may scrape, and from the top to the very bottom we should find what God finds: pure majesty in the Creator’s mind. When God constructed us there was no fault. We were built for a life that is ours, within our families, and to live where we live. Being where we are is cooperating with God. We’re wanted here. Indeed, we’re required here.

Whichever way we look at it—whether over the length of our lifespan, the breath of our experience, the height of our awestruck delirium, or the depth of our despair—we were made by a perfect Creator, to a beautiful genetic design. This is one of the most irrefutable facts. God made me. God made you. Both of us were made perfectly, acceptably to God.

Knowing Very Well Our Value To God

Could there be a more important role for each of us than to note our personal value to God? This, of course, converts into a blessed knowledge of the inherent value of every created thing. With such a wisdom stowed in our consciousness we appreciate everything to a much richer extent.

If we will commit to agreeing with the psalmist that we ‘know very well’ how fearfully and wonderfully made we are we need to get comfortable looking ourselves in the mirror, and seeing our true selves—the person beneath the skin.

Our value to God is incomprehensible to us. Appreciating just a small taste of how we’re beheld in Divine esteem is enough to begin to feel thoroughly good within our minds, bodies and souls. It’s enough to rebuild any false, lagging self-perception.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.