On Tuesday night I did a fun little activity where I looked at about 50 cards with words on them, sorted them, and chose the five that resonated the deepest with me. These five values are essential to who I am and how I look at the world. I have hardly ever been so decisive about anything in my life. Everything just fit together, and I could see connections so easily. My five core values are creativity, trust, love, wisdom, and simplicity.
Creativity is, for me, the color to the world. I have the ability look at a person in the depths of despair and use my creativity to look beyond their suffering and see the person they are made to be, who God sees them as. My imagination births determination to make reality match the beauty I see. Nothing is bland, dull, or just one color. Everything has depth and beauty and potential.
Trust is where faith, relationships, strength, and compassion lie. My trust in God holds me up, because He will never disappoint. Even if other people do, I can have compassion and strength because my trust is not in them, but in God. I can be bold because God is holding me up, despite the circumstances or lack of fruit. I can have compassion because I know that if I look to others instead of myself, God will look after me. Trust is the basis of my relationship with God, and I am able to have relationships with others because of that foundation. It doesn’t matter what happens or what other people do.
Wisdom is the filter by which my actions happen. I want to have wise compassion, wise love, wise trust, and wise creativity. Wisdom isn’t just knowing how to figure out which woman is the real mother. It is examining all of my thoughts, words, and actions carefully and through the lense of God, accurately recognizing the effect they will have on me and my enviornment. I recieve my wisdom from the Lord and the experiences He has given me here on earth.
Simplicity is the undiluted view of God, the world, people, everything. The gospel is simple. The fact of God’s love is simple, and we can rest in that. This is where peace comes from, laying our burdens down. We make life way too complicated, and I truly believe the whole human experience, what we are meant to do, the meaning if life is stated plainly and simply in Matthew 22:37-39. “…’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'” That is the “secret” to life, the universe. People spend decades searching, and the answer is right here, and it is so simple. We are all humans, equal in standing before God, and He loves us so much. All He asks is that we love him back, do what we were created to do.
My final word is love, and I believe this is where all things flow from. We accept God’s love, pour that out on others, and focus our love back onto Him. Through this I truly believe all good things come. Love can change people, situations, the entire world! It has changed me, and it sits at the core of who I am.
One neat thing about these words is that every individual has a different interpretation of them. Creativity might mean something completely different to you, and it is completely unique and beautiful.
Thank you so much for reading!
