What are you worth?

As a high schooler, I started praying a prayer that I have repeated off and on since then: "Father, help me to see people as you see them and not as the world sees them". It may not always be the same words, but the heart behind the prayer I say is the same: I want to know how to see and value people with the same heart and eyes that God does. It's not an easy thing to do and I fail at it regularly. However, I can say that when I come back to this prayer, especially when faced with the daunting task of forgiving someone who has hurt me deeply or with someone I vehemently disagree with, it helps me live with grace and mercy.

Oh, how I wish I lived out this prayer more often.

It’s not easy to admit this is a struggle for me, but when I look around at the world, I don’t feel so alone in it. Our culture is constantly shaping how we see and value people. And far too often, it’s shaping us in the wrong direction.

Just look at social media for a moment. Everywhere you turn, people are trying to monetize what used to simply be hobbies—making trick shots, throwing cards, playing video games. And I get why they do it. If someone can gather enough followers, likes, or clicks, they can start getting paid for their content. But what that does is slowly shift our sense of value. We begin to measure our worth by our “following.”

This "following" has become our new sense of worth in our society. The more followers, the more valuable you are. The more views, the more influence you have. The more you can be monetized, the more the world wants you.

This isn’t just true online. It’s woven into nearly every part of our capitalistic society. Rental properties, healthcare, online shopping, entertainment, insurance—you name it. At every turn, people are being reduced to numbers, to customers, to profit margins. We are trained to ask: What monetary value do you bring to me, my company, my community? How do you help me get more of what I want? How can I monetize you?

In a world where people’s value is based on how much money you make others, how does the church respond? How do we, instead of re-enforcing this worldly values system, push against it? How do we operate in such a way that lets people know their value to God and their value to us is not in the money they can either give or help us make? How do we communicate that we are not interested in how they help us accomplish our version of worldly success?

In order to answer these questions, the church and each of us as a part of the church must ask the even harder questions: How have we been complicit in re-enforcing this capitalistic value system? In what ways have we tried to monetize others for our own gain?

These aren’t easy questions to wrestle with, but if we truly want to see people as God sees them—not as dollar signs, not as stepping stones, not as tools for our own version of success—we have to face them. Because until we do, we’ll struggle to show people that their worth is rooted in something far greater: the immeasurable love and value given to them by their Creator.