Who Defines Your Worth?

Gwen Smith

Today's Truth
"You are precious and honored in my sight…" (Isaiah 43:4a, NIV).

Friend to Friend
Years ago, I bought my daughter a really cute jacket at the mall. It was a hoodie made of a cuddly fabric with cream, lavender, and mint green horizontal stripes. The jacket zipped up in the front and was well crafted, stylish, and simply adorable.

When I bought it, I felt like the price on the tag was a fair one, so I gladly pulled out my wallet and paid the retail amount. I was a kid in a candy store on the way home - fully anticipating a shriek of happiness from my little bag-of-beans when I gave it to her.

Delightfully, I wasn't disappointed. Kennedy loved her new coat, and I was pleased with my purchase. Happy dances all around… until a week later, when I saw the same jacket in the same store at a greatly reduced price. Are you tensing up with me? Suddenly, I felt schnookered! Ripped off. Taken advantage of. As soon as I saw the red line on the price tag of the unsold coats, everything changed in my mind – Kennedy's jacket wasn't worth what I paid for it.

A Healing Journey

Written by Angie Cote

Secret -concealed from general knowledge or view, hidden. (Webster’s Dictionary)

There are different kinds of secrets. Some are things hidden from our understanding, sometimes called the mysteries of life: how they built the pyramids, miracles, unexplained events. There are military secrets – confidential military matters, the CIA and spies. There are the secrets that are methods or formulas based on successes: if you send in your hundred dollars, you can receive a secret blend of tea/cream/pills guaranteed to make your cellulite disappear. Don’t we wish. There are the secrets where others share confidences with you.

Then you have the secrets that are of the personal nature – things that we have done ourselves, or had done to us, or been involved in that we don’t want anybody to know about. Usually it is something that is not socially or morally acceptable.