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Think for a moment about what you are worth.  We all wrestle mightily with self-evaluation and valuation.  It is a miserable trek into dark places that cause us to tally up our deeds and mis-deeds to come up with a figure.  It is an insatiable need for approval that causes us to poke and prod at loved ones to determine how much they love us.  It is an empty retort when we answer our own shallow question, "Am I a good person?"  And it is a magnifying glass and a mirror that a dark voice encourages us to hold through all of this.

But God delights in us.  The God of Eternity came to be with his creation, he came to be with Adam and Eve.  He was so delighted with what he had made, that even from just a portion of those initial lives, God was willing to endure the thousands of generations of wickedness that followed.  And he didn't love these generations less, but more!  A promise is made, and God made a plan based on the fullness of his Love.  Mankind would grow, yet not unchecked.  The God of history would burn and shape his people, reaping and sowing season after season and though the weeds overcome his precious grain, he remains sovereign.  We, the promise and the grain, curse God for the pain of existence without even acknowledging the Mercy contained within this notion: it is by His Love is that we exist at all.  (There is an untold, unknowable version of Creation in which God is so hurt by his creation that he wipes it out completely, insuring Order and Justice at the cost of Love and Free-Will.)

It is this decision from which we should determine our value:  That God so Loved the World, that he gave his only Son.  He gave himself for that which He himself had created.  And like a priceless work of Art, we have value not because of our composition, but because of our composer.  He made something so valuable that only he himself could pay the cost to own it.  It is the inward search for value that prevents us from being near our God.  But it is our inherent, if unrealized value that prevents our destruction.  If only we could see how much he loves us, we would cease to consider ourselves at all and take our rightful place absorbed in his presence.  And whoever believes in him, shall not perish but have eternal life.