The Undiminishable Value of You

There is a Japanese art form called kintsugi, in which broken pottery is mended with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The artisan does not hide the fractures or disguise the damage. Instead, the seams of repair become luminous veins running through the bowl, more beautiful for having been broken. The piece is not diminished by its history of fracture; it is, in some mysterious way, made more precious by it.

Most of us, however, do not feel like golden-veined pottery. We feel like shards swept into a dustpan.

We carry around an internal ledger of our failures, an unflinching inventory of the moments we would erase if we could.

The harsh word spoken to a child. The marriage that ended. The addiction that still whispers. The years wasted. The friend betrayed. The prayer abandoned. The sin confessed a hundred times that still rises in memory like smoke from a fire we thought was out.

And underneath all of it, often unspoken even to ourselves, lies a question more terrible than any single failure: Does any of this still matter? Am I still worth something?

This morning Pope Leo XIV released his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and tucked within it is a sentence that deserves to be carved into the lintel of every confessional, written across the mirror of every soul who has ever felt unworthy of love:

”No sin, failure, humiliation or exclusion can diminish the profound value of a human life that God has willed and called into being.” (par. 52).

Read it again. Slowly. Because this is not a sentimental line from a greeting card. This is theology. It is the heart of God for you.

 

The Origin of Worth

To understand why this sentence matters, we must first understand where our worth comes from.

The modern world tells us that worth is achieved. You earn it through accomplishment, beauty, productivity, influence, virtue, or charm.

You build your value the way you build a résumé, line by line, and you can lose it just as quickly when the lines fade. Under this view, a human being is essentially a stock whose price rises and falls with performance.

The biblical vision is radically different. In the first chapter of Genesis, before any human being has done anything at all, before there is virtue or vice or productivity or failure, God speaks:

"Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness." (Genesis 1:26, NRSV-2CE)

The Hebrew here uses the words tselem (image) and demut (likeness). The dignity of the human person is not earned and not granted as a reward for good behavior. It is constitutive. It belongs to the very structure of what we are, the way blueness belongs to the sky or roundness to a sphere.

You did not achieve your worth, which is precisely why you cannot lose it.

This is the foundation upon which Pope Leo’s sentence rests. When he says that no sin or failure can diminish your value, he is not being kind. He is being precise. He is stating a metaphysical fact.

Your worth is not a product of your behavior; it is a consequence of your existence as one whom God has “willed and called into being.”

 

The Four Thieves

Notice that Pope Leo XIV names four specific things that try to steal our sense of worth: sin, failure, humiliation, and exclusion.

Each of these deserves attention, because each works on us differently.

Sin accuses us from within. It whispers that we have proven ourselves unworthy, that we have made ourselves into something repugnant. There is a kind of grief over sin that is holy, the godly grief Paul speaks of that “produces a repentance that leads to salvation” (2 Corinthians 7:10). But there is also a counterfeit grief, a corrosive shame that does not draw us toward God but away from Him. The first says, “I have done wrong; I need mercy.” The second says, “I am wrong; I do not deserve mercy.”

Failure speaks the language of the world. It points to our incompletions, our broken projects, our unmet goals, the dreams that died on the vine. Failure tells us that our value was tied to outcomes we could not produce.

Humiliation is perhaps the most isolating of the four. It is the experience of being seen at our worst, exposed before others in a way we cannot retract. Humiliation makes us want to disappear, to fold ourselves into invisibility.

Exclusion is what others do to us. It is the table we were not invited to, the group that closed against us, the family that turned away, the community that decided we did not belong. Exclusion is uniquely painful because it suggests that our worth has been weighed by others and found wanting.

Pope Leo lists all four because he knows that human beings are wounded by all four, and that each one tells us a lie about who we are.

The lie of sin: you are filth.

The lie of failure: you are useless.

The lie of humiliation: you are contemptible.

The lie of exclusion: you do not belong.

To each of these, the encyclical answers with the same truth: not one of them can touch the value of a life that God has willed and called into being.

 

The Logic of the Cross

If you want to know how seriously God takes this, look at the Cross. The Incarnation is itself a divine declaration about the value of human life.

God did not become an amoeba. He didn't become mineral or a star or an angel.

He became one of us, knit into a womb, born in straw, and ultimately nailed to wood.

And the people He sought out most deliberately during His public ministry were precisely the people who had been crushed by Pope Leo’s four thieves.

He found a woman caught in adultery, dragged before a crowd of stones, the very picture of humiliation. He did not deny her sin, but neither did He let her sin define her. ”Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” (John 8:11)

He found a tax collector named Zacchaeus, a man whose failure of integrity had made him rich and despised, a man whose own people had excluded from any decent table. Jesus invited Himself to that man’s house, and the verdict was clear: ”Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.” (Luke 19:9)

He found a thief dying beside Him, a man whose entire life was a record of failure ending in the most humiliating death the Roman world could devise. And to him Jesus said, ”Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

In every case, the divine logic is the same. The sin is real. The failure is real. The humiliation and exclusion are real.

And yet none of them have diminished the worth of the soul Christ is speaking to. None of them. Not one.

 

The God Who Wills

There is a single word in Pope Leo’s sentence that, if you let it lodge in your heart, can change you. The word is willed. “A human life that God has willed and called into being.”

You are not an accident. You are not a biological coincidence. You are not the residue of evolutionary churn. Before time began, you were known, chosen, willed, desired. The prophet Jeremiah heard the Lord say:

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you." (Jeremiah 1:5)

And the Psalmist sang:

"For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." (Psalm 139:13-14)

This means that the worst day of your life does not change the fact that the eternal God specifically willed you. The most shameful hour you have lived does not retroactively cancel His decision to call you into being.

You exist because God wanted you to exist. Because He who is Love Himself loved you into Being.

He still does. The willing did not stop on your birthday; it did not stop with your last sin, your last failure, your last humiliation; it continues this very moment, holding you in existence as you read these words.

If God were to stop willing you, you would simply cease to be. The fact that you are still here, drawing breath, is itself a continuous declaration of your value to Him.

 

Living in This Truth

So how do we actually live inside this truth, rather than merely affirming it in theory?

First, learn to distinguish between conviction and condemnation. Conviction comes from the Holy Spirit and points to a specific sin with the hope of healing. Condemnation comes from the enemy of your soul and points at you, smearing your identity in shame.

When the voice in your head says, “You did something wrong, and Christ can restore you,” that is the voice of the Shepherd. When the voice says, “You are something wrong, and there is no use trying,” that is not God speaking, no matter how religious it sounds.

Second, practice receiving mercy rather than earning it. Many of us treat confessing our sins like a transaction in which we trade contrition for absolution. But mercy is not earned; it is received. The next time you confess, try entering not as a debtor paying what is owed but as a beloved child being welcomed home. The father in the parable of the prodigal son did not let his son finish his rehearsed speech. He ran. He embraced. He celebrated. That is what is happening in confession too, whether or not you can feel it.

Third, resist the urge to confirm your unworthiness through self-punishment. Many people, after a fall, withdraw from prayer, from the Eucharist, from community, almost as if to say, “I will earn back my place by serving my sentence in exile.” But God does not want your exile. He wants you. Return quickly. The longer you stay away, the louder the lies grow.

Fourth, extend to others the truth you need for yourself. The person who has hurt you, the one who has failed publicly, the one whose sin is the talk of the parish, the one whose life is a visible wreck, is also one whom God has willed and called into being. If their value cannot be diminished, then neither can the call to honor them as bearers of the image of God.

The way we treat the fallen is often the most honest measure of whether we have actually understood the gospel.

Fifth, let your scars become kintsugi. The places where you have been broken are not the parts of your story to hide. In God’s hands they become the very seams through which His glory shines into a watching world. Paul learned this the hard way, and from his learning came one of the most freeing sentences in all of Scripture: ”My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

You are a vessel. You have been cracked. You may even feel shattered. But you are held in the hands of an Artisan who specializes in gold-veined restoration, and no sin, no failure, no humiliation, and no exclusion has the authority to declare you worthless.

God willed you. God still wills you. That is the first word about you, and it will be the last.