The moment we are born, we become targets of an ever-present malevolent spirit that hovers over all of us.

That spirit tells us, through words and actions of others whom we love and of those whom we do not even know, that we are not worthy, not enough, not deserving of a good life.

In her book, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, Jacquelyn Grant describes how she and her siblings grew up knowing and saying the name of Jesus. She says that “the love and kindness, the giving and sacrifices, and the community service and political interest we witnessed in our parents were in the name of Jesus.” Her parents, she said, “lived out the theology of somebodiness,” conveying to their children that they were special to and cherished by God, something they were to hold onto in spite of how the world would deride and denigrate them because of their color and/or gender.

Many to most of us have heard the words “you will never amount to anything” in some form, words spoken to us or to someone we know by someone we love. The words and companion behavior are deadly to one’s soul. Like a drill, they bore a hole in our very souls, providing a path for any negative word or opinion to traverse in order to feed our wound of insecurity and self-loathing which is often the result of the put-down of our worth.

The feeling of being “nobody” or “not enough” follows us, sits with us, and reminds us of its presence. In the spiritual space of feeling like a nobody, we decrease and minimize ourselves. How must the world suffer because of so many people sitting in saucers of despair because they do not know their worth?

It is only in making the decision to deepen our relationship with God that we are able to get the antidote to the spiritual disease called insecurity. For a while, most of us  will not pray and ask God for help in the fight to become whole – largely because we do not know how broken we are until we decide to look at ourselves honestly. We don’t ask pertinent questions about ourselves (to ourselves) because we don’t want the answer. Truth is painful. But when we decide that something is wrong, something is off-balance, as we look at how people who do have a sense of being somebody and who move and live in that knowledge, we begin to tentatively seek God as we never have before. The words of the prophet Jeremiah give God’s promise: that we will find   God when we search for God with all of our heart. Ironically, it is when we reach our limit of spiritual and emotional fatigue, so tired that all we can do is look for God, that we are our strongest.

God listens. God hears the ebb and flow of our words which express our desire to have a different mindset, a different way of walking and relating to life and to the people with whom we interact. At those moments, we are rather like Hagar, banned to the wilderness by a jealous wife because of who she was. God did not abandon Hagar but heard her cries…and came to her. God does the same for us. In the experience of prayer – which becomes different when we are in these spaces because we are more prone not only to talk to God but to be quiet and listen for and to God, God whispers. We incline our ear as we begin to realize something is happening. God whispers to us, showing us people and situations, which will help us see and learn what we must see and learn. God gently yet relentlessly toward the Truth – which is that we are all somebody, special to and worthy of God’s love. In that whispering, God begins to show us parts of ourselves that we have never known because in our sense of being nobody, we assumed that there was nothing deeper to us or in us that was important.

Recently, I heard a judge talk about how a woman who was down on her luck because of drug use was asked to write an essay (an exercise this judge asked for of many offenders.) The first sentence of her essay was, “I am battling a terminal disease. Twenty-four years ago, I was told I had a terminal disease and had only months to live.” The judge stopped her. “Can you read that last sentence again?” The woman repeated it and the judge said, “Do you not hear what you said? Do you not see that you are so much more, and can do much more, than you think you can? Do you realize that you have enormous strength? Nobody lives for 24 years with a diagnosis of a terminal disease.” Of course, some people do, but the point of the judge’s statement is that this woman was living in a place of fear, insecurity, self-pity and “nobodiness,” giving her subliminal justification for her drug use.

The judge said that watching the woman’s face was like watching a light come on. This poor soul hadn’t thought of her victories, or worth or her strength, but had instead opted to live in a dungeon of despair for years. She believed she was a nobody and so she had lived way below her spiritual and emotional capacity for years.

We are somebody because God made us. It does not matter who has said what to us; their opinions do not trump God’s genius in making us somebody. Our worth is not determined by our race, color, gender, sexuality, emotional health or illness; it is not determined by the thickness of our lips or the width of our hips; it is not determined by our level of education or the jobs we do. Our worth was created and built into us at the moment of our conception. The moment of birth puts us all in the crosshairs of that malevolent spirit which seeks to beat us down, but God is greater than that spirit and yearns for us to realize that the malevolent spirit is a lie.

We know when we are moving away from feeling like nobody to knowing we are somebody. We can feel it. As Hagar knew God was with her as she sat in a bad place and space with her son, we, too, know when some stubborn part of us has been released and we begin to embrace the theology of “somebodiness.” We live the words of the cherished hymn, “Amazing Grace:” I once was lost but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see!”

We are somebody, no matter what.

Amen and amen.