Article March 24, 2008 Issue

WHO'S THE BEST?

LOIS DEGLER

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

THERE'S SO MUCH FOCUS in the media and in individual conversations about who is the most beautiful, most successful, best dressed, or most powerful or influential. Implicit is that there is only one best. It's as if everyone in the world were stacked in a vertical pile, with the best person on top all the way down to the least valuable person. It's easy to get caught up in such a mind-set and then feel that you're not of value because you're way down in the pile.

But one way out of that feeling is to ask, "What if everything were the color blue?" How dull would that be? That's what I asked myself one day while wrestling with thoughts of being unworthy. I'd been comparing myself to a powerhouse of a woman. And there was no comparison. She was brighter, more productive, more of every good thing than I was. Or so it seemed. The comparison left me flat.

Many of us have had to face this sort of personal putdown. In the past whenever these feelings came to me and made me unhappy, a trusted friend would say, "Those are not your thoughts." Finally I understood what he meant, and that has helped me move beyond those feelings of being unworthy. He was telling me that those thoughts had their roots in a distorted view of myself, as not being created by God. Therefore they had no validity.

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