Each of Us Is Priceless: A Guest Post by Bryan Crum

Working as a hospice chaplain, I’ve discovered two truths about life: First, that each of us is priceless, and second, that somehow, we’ve forgotten this truth about ourselves. Sitting one-on-one with people confronting their mortality is a crash course in priorities. When you share in someone’s final moments and watch people take out their most valuable memories and hold them up to the light to examine them one last time, you realize we all share some fundamental needs. We need to be loved and to know our time on this earth meant something. We all have similar regrets and doubts. The piece we miss most is how valuable we are.

There is a disconnect between what we are worth and what we believe we are worth. It’s hard to believe that our internal price tags simply say “Jesus,” but that is what we are worth to God. To our earthly ears, considering ourselves to be worth the life of Jesus sounds egotistical, but that feeling is not from God. Our value is common knowledge in heaven. God, heaven, and the angels understand how much was paid for God’s creation to be redeemed, so when we recognize our value, we acknowledge a truth that heaven knows well. Loving ourselves is not ego; it’s understanding how God feels about us. Jesus knew that when we understand our worth, we discover the worth inside the people around us because we realize that their price tags bear the same name as ours.

I’ve watched too many of us struggle with self-love and embracing our true identities in Christ – usually because of past mistakes or unfinished accomplishments. Still, the truth is, Jesus didn’t die for who we are now or, for the people we can become, or the things we will accomplish. Jesus died for us while we were in the middle of those past mistakes – the ones we still worry about. We can’t add any more worth to our lives. Jesus doesn’t need to die a second time on the cross. We don’t need more redeeming; we just need to understand the redemption we already have. 

A pastor named Myles Munroe once said, “The wealthiest place on earth is the cemetery because it holds the treasures that people never served to humanity.”

We all have something to share. We all have talents and gifts to give, but too many of us never take the leap of faith required to chase those dreams.

There are books people never got to read because they were never written, and music people never got to hear or sing because it was never composed. The graveyard is filled with businesses that were never opened and ideas and inventions that people never shared with the world because they never followed their dreams and took those treasures to the grave.

I’m on a mission to help people fall in love with God’s greatest creation: us. To help people chase after the dreams God has placed upon their hearts. To help people discover their value and live their worth.