Here I Am. I Cannot Do Otherwise.

Have you ever wished you were someone else, maybe a celebrity, maybe anyone but yourself? Do the people closest to you pick at who you are? The way I read it, we are already whole in God's sight, even when we can't quite believe that ourselves. Forgiveness is an enormous gift, and the Bible frames it as something that came at real cost. Right behind accepting forgiveness sits a harder idea: if God can pardon everything we have done and keep doing, then the people who have wronged us, and who keep wronging us, have a claim on that same pardon. One for one.

The capacity to accept ourselves is already in us, and so is the willingness of God to do the same. When you start to see yourself as one of God's children, accepting yourself gets a little less heavy. I grew up in an era when discipline often came through tearing a child down. Two methods stand out from that time. One was withholding affection as a punishment. The other was the constant refrain of what will the neighbors think. Kids are springy by nature, and they can bounce back from a lot of this, particularly when they have solid friends, quiet hours to think, books within reach, or a teacher or some other grown-up worth imitating who shows them how to accept who they are.

Wake up early to your own spirit and your own soul, and you carry a certain power: the power to push past obstacles, and the power to refuse the put-downs that adults and classmates hand you. None of this comes equally easy everywhere. There are adults and peers who warp what life is supposed to be, who shove a kid toward a kill-or-be-killed code, one crew set against another, a place that can feel like a war with no exit toward anything calm. Then there are the comfortable households, no real money trouble, where mothers and fathers and private tutors lean hard on children to excel in areas the child may have no gift for at all. The self-esteem gets ground down. The sense of a future dries up.

Into both of those worlds drugs slip in quietly, a way to blur the surroundings and mute the pressure, though getting them often means breaking the law to do it. Use climbs, and with it comes damage to the body and the mind. At first the whole thing can look appealing, a release valve for the strain of a so-called successful life. Very few people who reach success or fame see in advance what that success drags along behind it, or learn how to carry it. The shortcut tempts them. So does leaning too hard on the things that genuinely take the edge off.

You can go the independent route, of course, and skip a religious frame and the backing it offers. Choose that, and you still have to work out which faith you'd call the true one and how you mean to live it. Discomfort can itself be a signal worth reading. Within Christianity, the Bible can be the thing you measure against, read with an open mind and an honest wish to follow God, as God is shown first in the Hebrew scriptures, then through His son Jesus, then through the disciples. That reading asks for a lot: self-examination, actually doing what the Word says, and the recognition that believing in God can leave you feeling like a person who matters, and can show you how to bring others into your life, people who accept you as you accept them.

And finally, consider holding the newborn, even the unborn, as a person already worth something: someone who might grow up liking who they are, someone who might treat others the way they themselves were treated.