Valuing Things; Loving People
and not letting goals replace people
I think that valuing someone is different than loving them.
“To value” means to consider, rate, or scale in usefulness, importance, or general worth. It’s a term used to describe a fair return or equivalence in goods, services, or money (merriam-webster.com).
We can consider someone or someone’s services of great value. But that’s not the same as loving them.
Value has to do with our measurement of someone. Love has to do with a relationship with someone. Value is a way we view someone. Love is how we interact with someone. Valuing someone is good, but God told us to love one another.
When I’m trying to accomplish something, I sometimes forget to love people and instead value them. Take my recent painting project, for example. Over the last two months, I’ve been working with my children to paint their rooms. My goal wasn’t to have an ideal house or to grow closer to my kids. No, the goal was to keep my kids busy, clean their rooms, and teach them something.
As this project stretched on longer than I expected, I grew anxious to get the house back in order, and my focus shifted. In the last week of the project, my kids started looking less and less like little learners and more and more like little obstacles. And on the last day of the project, I put the kids in front of screens so I could move the heavy furniture back into place myself. I no longer cared if the kids were involved or learning anything. I just wanted the project done.
I do this quite often in parenting. I stop loving my kids and instead value them for how well they accomplish a certain goal or learn a certain skill. Instead of dining with my family, my goal becomes to make that yummy-looking recipe—come hell or high-water. Instead of having a new experience with my kids, my goal becomes to get them to like the new experience. Instead of learning how to love my family through writing, my goal becomes to escape being with cranky kids. Instead of raising my kids with my husband, my goal becomes to just raise the kids so I can enjoy my husband again without kids interrupting.
When we no longer care to involve the people we’re called to love, when our goal is to just get the work done, we fall into the trap of valuing people for what they can do instead of loving them as God loves them. We see people only in relationship to what we’re trying to accomplish rather than people in relationship with us, like God is with us, doing his good will in and through us.
God will not permit such behavior in his children. He will write his laws on our hearts by leading us to the cross to give up our lofty goals and “heavenly” ideals in exchange for a heart like God’s. We value things; we love people.
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I like this! Good reminder!