Being used, feeling useful and finding your true worth

Last night I went to see the latest Mission Impossible film.

As we have come to expect from the franchise it is filled with unbelievable stunts and incredible actions sequences, all wrapped around a thrilling edge of your seat storyline. It might not be completely credible but it’s easy to suspend disbelief in reality, sit back, munch your popcorn and enjoy.

The one line that jumped out at me was

                “He can use you. He will see your value.” (paraphrased)

Ethan Hunt is talking about Kittridge, the puppet master of the IMF, who pulls everyone’s strings should you accept his mission.

He will recruit those with worth to the cause, those with the right shady skill set, the kind of talents that would put most people behind bars. But if you mess up, leave too many dead bodies in your wake, or if you go rogue, you are immediately disavowed, abandoned on your own.

So why did this almost throwaway line stick in my head? I’m sure most people sitting in the cinema would not have given it a second thought.

Probably because I’ve been reading a book called Valuable by Liz Carter. Under the beautiful gold lettering of the title, it says “why your worth is not defined by how useful you feel.”

Liz suffers from a chronic lung condition which can stop her from leaving the house for days and has on some occasions been so severe that she has been hospitalised. Further lung damage from complex pneumonia meant she had to give up teaching and one day she faced the inevitable introductory question. “What do you do?”

It’s said so innocently, it trips off the tongue as if what you do is what makes you important in life.

I will admit it’s my least favourite question too, I’m a full-time mum, but my boys are now in their twenties, a housewife without a husband to care for since he died, a volunteer, a cancer survivor, a writer??? Maybe? Please ask a different question or compliment me on my hair instead.

We are obsessed with what people DO, but does a fancy job title make them valuable? Liz calls this the “productivity lie.”

If we are not USEFUL to society what about as a Christian being USEFUL to God?

Sadly, it has become common parlance in our prayer lives when we face tough times. I have prayed that God can USE my situation of being widowed young and I so often see writing a book about it that helps others as the reason it all happened in the first place. In my tiny human brain that sort of makes some sense of the tragedy.

Liz wonders if this language is helpful? Does God really USE us like an object?

It is a crass way of seeing things, we don’t have our own children to be our objects, seeing their worth in what they can do for us and God is the perfect heavenly Father. We are not created to be His puppets.

Unlike Kittridge in Mission Impossible God does not judge our worth in what we can do, he won’t disavow and reject us if we fail.

He loves us unconditionally and, in her book, Liz highlights other words to redefine our relationship with God “partnership, joining and co-working.”

God’s Kingdom is an upside down one where he comes alongside the broken, the messed up, those who feel they don’t measure up. Just look at the disciples, mostly fishermen, a tax collector, a motley crew of misfits and hardly the brightest bunch but Jesus chose them as his closest friends and revealed his secrets to them, even if they rarely understood the bigger picture.

Jesus didn’t USE them, he gently worked alongside them in partnership and even in their failings they were not USELESS. Their stories give us hope that there is a place for us in our weakness too. We are VALUABLE.

As Liz says in her concluding chapter, “you are a mirror of God’s glory, not an object of God’s use.”

It could take some time to completely change the language we use (pun intended), to be honest we probably never will but maybe being more aware is a good start. Better yet got hold of a copy of the book - just click here  https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/valuable 

And a final takeaway from Mission Impossible – while Kittridge may think he’s all powerful and in control, Ethan Hunt and his allies never doubt their worth and always look out for one another. Not because they might come in useful for the next mission but because as painful as it might be to admit they are true friends.