It's good...
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As a mental health counselor one of the biggest issues I run into is people believe their life is an accident. The circumstances surrounding one’s conception and birth can have a profound impact on your mental health. It is the starting line from whence the narrative of your life takes off. Many a client of mine believes themselves to be an accident, an “oops baby” of sorts, to not belong in this world, to be of no value or worthless.
What does life look like when you believe deep down you’re worthless? It can manifest as perfectionism. Every detail of self and life must be perfect and if it is not, then it’s completely wasted. You feel that you are in debt to life from the moment you were born. Life is a party to which you were not invited, but since you’re here anyhow, it’s going to take some hard work and solid contributions to keep your seat at the table. There is a crippling anxiety that often accompanies this view of life, a fear that if you’re not perfect other people will notice how worthless you are and cut you out of their lives. Believing in your own worthlessness can also show up as a depression. The moment you remember there’s no chance you can ever be perfect, you fall into despair and gloom. What’s the point of even getting out of bed, if you can’t meet the unrealistically high demands the world has for you?
Sure enough, when you believe you’re worthless, you’ll start to behave like you’re worthless. Because your behavior is so convincing, those around you will begin to treat you like your worthless. They’ll use you and abuse you. Family and friends will find it difficult to be around you. A few of them may try to fight back against your belief of worthlessness: they don’t buy into the lie that you’re a piece of trash. They still consistently love and cherish you. In fact, they probably love you more than you even love yourself. Out of hope and concern, they may try to convince you that you’re not worthless. But your own stubborn refusal to believe you’re lovable and worthwhile will eventually exhaust them to the point of them pulling away.
Suppose you’re a client of mine. You might object to what I’m saying and tell me that I don’t know how bad you really are. You’ll pull out all the examples and anecdotes about how unlovable you are. It will be a compelling argument, given with great passion. The evidence usually begins with your early childhood relationship with your parents and works its way forward into the rest of life. In some cases, your parents really didn’t want you – this may be hard to acknowledge, but it is reality. Or perhaps both your parents (or one of them) say they did want you around, but their actions speak otherwise. Maybe you have an emotionally distant mother, for whom nothing was ever good enough. Or an absent father who only contacts you when he needs something. Maybe your parents abandoned you at a very young age and you have no idea why.
Your parents might have done any of the above to you, and their parents did it to them, and their parents did the same to them. On and on down the line, through the generations. At this point, therapy may be a great start, but I doubt it will answer the deeper questions in your heart. An explanation of the mechanisms behind life won’t be a sufficient foundation to build your life on. What’s needed is a story that goes beyond us, beyond our parents. A story about who we are and where we come from.
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I readily admit that I don’t understand how our universe came to be. I can barely figure out the more advanced features on my Zoom account, so what would I know of the secrets of the universe? What I have noticed is that when it comes to the origins of life, there seems to be a false dichotomy between believing in “creationism” verses believing in “science”. On the one side (science) you have researchers and professors from Harvard and MIT, writing theories that my Sunday Night Football watchin’ self is too dumb to comprehend. On the other side (creationism) you have the lady who taught Sunday morning bible school, whose house is filled with hand crafted cat pillows.
The idea that one must pick one or the other is not necessarily true. The broad concept we refer to as “science” has brought many wonderful things into this world – vaccines, automobiles, spacecrafts, and Super Nintendo. Science is also constantly changing. What today is cutting edge, tomorrow is crockery. Theories are held as damn-near truths, only to be overturned by some young hotshot researcher who thinks outside the box. Science is like the Andy Griffith Show. We can look back on it now and know beyond a reasonable doubt that it was objectively bad, but at the time they thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread (which had come on the scene the year beforehand).
Science attempts to describe HOW something happens, whereas the opening chapters of the Bible (on which creationism is based) are describing WHY the world came to be. Creationism was not intended to describe how, precisely because our understanding and knowledge about the world is constantly changing. As an example, consider the original intended audience for the book of Genesis (the first book of the Bible). They were ancient near eastern subsistence farmers. They had no concept of things we now know, like microorganisms, just as people hundreds of years from now will have knowledge of things we have no concept of, like to-go coffee cup lids that don’t leak.
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To use a mental health analogy Genesis is like your parents describing the details of your conception (a WHY explanation):
“We had been trying for a long time to have kids, we wanted to start a family”
Whereas Science is like the Cleveland Clinic’s medical website describing the details of your conception (a HOW explanation):
“A sperm cell from a fertile man swims up through the vagina and into the uterus of a woman and joins with the woman's egg cell as it travels down one of the Fallopian tubes from the ovary to the uterus.” [1]
Both can be true, and both are important. In this regard, the Genesis narrative is unique among origin stories in answering the WHY. Unlike the “Big Bang” (which is also what your parents call the night of your conception), the Genesis narrative implies intentionality, not accident.
God created spaces (time, weather, food) and then filled those spaces. God endowed people with a piece of himself*, an inherent value that can never been taken away regardless of how society judges a person’s value. God gave humankind a purpose to steward and give name to those things in our care.
As a science lesson, the opening chapters of the Bible are a mess. The attempts to square the details of these passages with data collected from nature have resulted in such awkward explanations as “Dinosaurs never lived, but God put the bones in the ground to test our faith.” Sounds good! Can I get some of those hand-crafted cat pillows?
As a foundation for your mental health however, the opening chapters of the Bible can clear up a lot of misunderstanding and pain. So rather than trying to get the passage to explain HOW, allow it to live its intended purpose and say WHY. This WHY is very important because people need hope. They need to know there is an intentionality to existence. Many look around at their own lives and see nothing but a perceived lack of talent, purpose and identity. They search for something that will fill these deep holes – love, achievement, comfort. But all the self-medicating is often not sufficient to shake the deep down, unspoken, unconscious feeling that there is no point to life.
That’s when they end up in my counseling office. There are all kinds of names we give for the expression of their experience: Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, etc. We talk about what’s going on in their life, but eventually we must get down to the nitty gritty of belief. What do you believe about the world? What gives you hope? Many times, those sources of hope are fleeting and flimsy.
We’ll talk about their parents, their father, who is often absent or uncaring, distracted or himself self-medicating. Bad parents present a major hurdle to living a successful life. We can go back to their childhood and process what happened. We can even forgive and heal, move on in life.
But ultimately, the Genesis narrative can be powerful for your mental health. It’s a story that affirms your life. You are inherently valuable. Your life was created with intentionality. You have a purpose and an identity deeper than what you produce and consume for society.
Your original parent, parent to your parents, and their parents before them, looks at you says, “It’s good.”
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*It can get kind of hard deciding which pronoun to use when describing God. My favorite definition is Dr. Larry Crabb’s “God is a party happening”. Due to the relational and communal nature of God (three in one) I think “they” is an appropriate pronoun, but I avoided it for clarity in the article.