Worthless

No one likes to lose. Everyone likes to gain something. If at all anyone wants to lose something it would be something or someone they don’t want anymore. Almost always the losable things are viewed as worthless. No one fights for worthless things: the things that would not bring any happiness, money, power or fame, the people who mean nobody to us; the people who cannot make us happy or the people who are not able to give us anything back.

The pain of losing is common not only for human beings but for God too, in fact only God knows that pain fully since we have been frequently losing ourselves. No one will die even for a just man, says St. Paul. Jesus died for us when we were still sinners. Losing becomes difficult to us only when we know the true worth of a person. That true worth of a person is fully known to only God since our worth comes from God. God created us to be valuable and respected since we are the image and likeness of God.

The Gospel passage reveals certain truth to us today. In the eyes of man, that lost sheep or the lost coin is worthless. We tend to say: “I have the ninety nine. I don’t want to risk my life by finding the lost one.” The voice from the ninety-nine says, “He should not have gone out, now see: he is in great danger.” These comments make us aware of the worthlessness of the lost one. We tend to know the worth of everybody according to their usefulness or blindness to the real self of the person who we call ‘lost’.

The easiest way to God’s heart is taking part in the journey of God in finding the lost sheep: in other words recognizing everyone’s worth by not human standards, rather God’s standard. That will certainly make us sharers of the joy in heaven. Let us continue to pray that we recognize that our personal worth and the worth of all human beings come from God. Amen.