What Do You Really Need?

To feel worthwhile to yourself and to others.

Wrote of a single woman is her sixties who had suffered all her life from low self-esteem.
Here's her story.

    When she was born, her mother either could not raise her or chose not to. At birth the little infant was placed on an orphanage. As she grew into childhood, she became painfully aware that she was different. Periodically prospective parents would come to view the the children. The attendants would dress them in their best clothes, line them up(about like you would if you would if you were showing your dog in an animal show) and then the adopting parents would pick a child. Repeatedly, the  little girl was left behind.

As she was growing up, the message she got was: "You have to be a good girl if you ever expect to be adopted. "Finally, at age twelve, it happened. At last, she had her own mother and father, but even then she seemed to feel that acceptance with her new family was based on how good she was. That persistent, nagging feeling was there, "You can never be good enough."

As a teenager, she went to church and heard the gospel. At the invitation, she responded and came forward to accept the Lord as her personal Savior. That night she went home and prayed that God would let her die! Just a minute, you may be thinking, wasn't she happy to know that she was God's child? Not so, in this case. She felt that she could only alternative was to pray that she would die and go straight to heaven while her record was clear. Then in her letter to me she asked if God performs plastic surgery of the heart to take away the scars of childhood.

Question: How good must you be for Good to love you ?

The fact is that your goodness or even your badness has nothing to do with the answer. In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, he made it very clear that out acceptance before God is not a matter of our goodness what we do, or don't do but is based on what Jesus Christ did.