Abba Father, I am coming to you because you understand me like no one else. You know that I struggle with myself more than anyone else. There is just a part of me that is afraid that “What I do is never going to amount to anything, so why do I even try?” I know that this attitude is defeatist in nature and not good for me, but sometimes I am literally paralyzed with this fear and I stay in my room watching Netflix or just finding pins to put on my Pinterest boards so that I can say to myself that I am doing something worthwhile. I know that every moment doesn’t have to be productive, but I am just feeling like I don’t know what is worth something anymore. Which parts of what I do actually matter? Which matter to You? Are you pleased with me when I do almost nothing for an entire day? How far does Your ability to love me go?
I look at my kids and realize that You love me more than I love them. My love for them is not contingent upon whether they do anything. I just want them to work on whatever they love and have a passion to do because I know that doing what they love is part of living in the giftedness that you gave them. So since You are a good and perfect Father to me, you love me right where I am no matter what I am doing. Your love is not about what I do.
So today I am letting go of trying to be something other than who I am. I will live in the moment and let myself work on things that you’ve given me a desire to do! I will live in the truth that You love me just as I am and you have joy over me. And if you have joy over me, then I will have joy that you feel that way about ME!
The fact that the God who made the entire universe and keeps life in motion loves me and feels actual joy over me is beyond comprehension! How can you feel joy when you look at me? I look at me and see a self-absorbed, anxious, worried, inept, disaster who keeps hurting others and can’t seem to stop. But then I see You watching me and how Your eyes light up just because I am me! You created me so that you could enjoy knowing me. When I talk to You, You listen and You care and You are glad that I came to chat with You for a while.
And then I think about how Jesus came here to this earthly place where he lived like me and felt all of the same messy jumble of feelings that I do. And he endured those feelings of shame and humiliation and sadness and then pain like I’ve never known when He was made a human sacrifice. All because You love me enough to do absolutely anything to have me in Your life!!
So what can I say? I will choose to see myself as whole and healed and loved and righteous. I will say of myself the things that are true. I am clean. I am held. I am blessed. I am highly favored.
I am YOURS.
Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” Nehemiah 8:10
“But I said, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all. Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand, and my reward is with my God.” Isaiah 49:4
“The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights.” Habakkuk 3:19
Daniel 10:17 “How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe.”
sallythetall 
Sally, this is such a meaningful prayer and one that I think very productive people indeed feel often–that they are not measuring up to the unreasonably strict standards of what they expect of themselves. I think it makes sense to look at the feeling of ineptitude itself in light of what society’s pressures are, and it is then that I think: I want something better for my children than they anxiety it brings. Part of that “something” is the truly counter-cultural tendency we find in the slow pace of life in the Bible, another part in monasticism and the sheer spiritual necessity of being alone and “uselessly” inactive and unproductive for hours at an end, from time to time. Your wonderful prayer anticipates and then arrives at a similar realisation of giving ourselves up to God, who then gives us back to our true and wiser selves.
(I link to this related article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/)
God bless you.
With great admiration and respect,
Frank
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Wow Frank! You have me rethinking what it means to know that I have worth! It makes sense to actually see that we are not what we do in the sense that each moment does not need to be productive and sometimes we need to “be ‘uselessly’ inactive and unproductive for hours on end” as you say. You have given me much to ponder about where I find my sense of worth in reality…the article you linked to made that much clear to me. I believe that I get my sense of worth from knowing who I am in Christ, but if I don’t truly feel relaxed at the thought of doing nothing sometimes, then I might be fooling myself, and, like the article speaks of, be finding my true worth in the religion of “workism”. Perhaps monasticism would be good for me! (however intolerable it sounds!) Thank you for the well-thought out comment!
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