Posts
Hannah Morrell
Priceless Treasure

One of the most often repeated lies people share with me in terms of what they think about themselves is that they are worthless. This has been communicated by various people in their lives, or by their own definition time and time again. Sometimes they feel they should be at a different place in their lives and that would give worth. Sometimes they believe if they had worked hard enough to make people like them that this would give them worth. Sometimes they have been told that their only worth lies in their being used for whatever purpose the user desires, and that they will lose worth if they stop allowing someone to use them.

Worth is not transactional. It is not given when we earn it. A person doesn’t gain worth the more they achieve, relate to others, or give. Some people try to convince themselves they have worth, but it is usually based in something they have to believe about themselves. When someone communicates they are not worth their time, the façade is gone and we struggle to believe we have worth apart from what others communicate.

When we experience rejection while trying to find someone to communicate worth, any sense of having worth is obliterated as we have placed the definition on a person or place in this world. It is gut-wrenching, and feels like death.

Priceless Treasure
Posts
Hannah Morrell
God of the Storm

We had a crazy windstorm last week with almost 24 hours of intense wind gusts and the resulting damages—trees falling, fences knocked down, various lawn chairs and trampolines blown away. I’ve never been through a hurricane on the coast, and I realized what people talk about with the sheer noise wind can create. My husband had to wear earplugs to sleep, and the howling and crashing went on all night.

At some point during the night, I woke up and listened to the wind for a bit while lying in bed. It dawned on me that this was what the disciples felt when they were out in the boat with Jesus, except they were on a boat tossed by the waves rather than a warm bed in a safe house. I imagined the fear and panic that would govern in a situation like that. They were pretty sure they were going to die out there in that storm.

Jesus had been teaching about faith prior to this story told in Mark 4. When the storm comes up, he is SLEEPING. This makes no sense to us when we don’t realize that God is enough in a storm, but Jesus knew His Father was watching out for Him and didn’t need to worry or stress about anything.

God of the Storm
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Hannah Morrell
God's Love

God loves you. That phrase has gotten trite and feels shallow sometimes. And yet, it is anything but trite and shallow. While we hated, mocked, spat on Him, God loves us. While we ran from Him and fought any call of His to come to Him, God loves us. While we rebelled and invited more and more darkness into ourselves, God loves us. While the selfishness took over to distort us into maniacal narcissists, God loves us. While we postured in false humility and rode ego trips for our “good” deeds, God loves us.

God reached through the darkness with which we had surrounded ourselves, calling our names and extending His hand to pull us out of the pit. We didn’t know Him, but He knew us. He knew every bit of us and still chose to love us. He loved us to death, and to resurrection in power. Jesus walked the road of ultimate sacrifice, knowing what was in each of us and how we chose our own way. He looked past it and loved anyway. He never stops loving. We simply need to accept the love.

God's Love
Posts
Hannah Morrell
Being a Snail

I have been thinking about how cool it is that we take a safe place with us no matter where we go. We are similar to snails—they carry their home on their backs, ready to pull into a shell whenever things get scary. The difference is that our safe place is within, and we can access it any time without physically moving. God no longer dwells in a temple made with hands, but in His people. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) He has given us His Spirit, and His very Life within.  

We are in Christ, and Christ is in us. We contain the wrap-around presence of God within us all the time. It’s kind of a cool picture, isn’t it? We carry Him, and He wraps around us and shelters us as well. So many things with God’s kingdom are both/and. His Life is in us, and we are in Him.

Being a Snail
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Hannah Morrell
Breathe & Rest

You don’t have to keep running.
You don’t have to keep fighting.
You don’t have to keep searching for the “cure.”
You don’t have to keep trying.

I know you are tired,
And ache for something more.
I know you just want to sit down,
Letting the weight you’re carrying fall.

The idea that you will get a place
Where it makes sense to rest
Is a fallacy and will continue to drive you
Crazy and exhausted and weary.

Breathe & Rest

worth

Priceless Treasure

Priceless Treasure

One of the most often repeated lies people share with me in terms of what they think about themselves is that they are worthless. This has been communicated by various people in their lives, or by their own definition time and time again. Sometimes they feel they should be at a different place in their lives and that would give worth. Sometimes they believe if they had worked hard enough to make people like them that this would give them worth. Sometimes they have been told that their only worth lies in their being used for whatever purpose the user desires, and that they will lose worth if they stop allowing someone to use them.

Worth is not transactional. It is not given when we earn it. A person doesn’t gain worth the more they achieve, relate to others, or give. Some people try to convince themselves they have worth, but it is usually based in something they have to believe about themselves. When someone communicates they are not worth their time, the façade is gone and we struggle to believe we have worth apart from what others communicate.

When we experience rejection while trying to find someone to communicate worth, any sense of having worth is obliterated as we have placed the definition on a person or place in this world. It is gut-wrenching, and feels like death.

Abiding Life

Abiding Life

So, you accept that Jesus is the way and you invite Him into your life, accepting the complete forgiveness He’s already given for all the ways you’ve tried to do life on your own, and recognizing He makes your spirit alive. In this acceptance, you emerge a new person with access to all the power of the living God who does not ask you to live life by yourself and in your own strength, but provides His through His Life within in the presence of His Spirit.

You aren’t trying to prove yourself or do the right things, but rather you are living out the worth that God has already given you. You haven’t earned it, and it can’t be taken away. Jesus said you have worth, value and meaning, and He wants relationship with you—that’s why He suffered and died to make a way ahead. He beat up death, sin, evil and darkness, freeing us from ever having to serve them. We do choose to serve them sometimes, but we don’t have to—we have another way.

So, how do we live life now? First, you acknowledge that you are loved without having to perform or achieve or do one solitary thing. You have been called a child of God, and He loves you immensely without your achievement. Second, it isn’t about sin. Sin was dealt with on the cross, and is our master no more. Instead, it’s about believing that God will do what He says and recognizing that I can’t do it on my own.

Life for the religious often becomes a hamster wheel of doing “for” God and staying away from the things that might make Him mad. But in doing that, we are missing the point. He wants relationship, not performance. We don’t love others because we’ve decided to love really hard. We love others because He loved us first and that love overflows out of us onto someone else. And the things He tells us not to do are not because He’s going to blast us if we do them, but we start to recognize that they are the places of misery for us. Often these are the things we run to in order to try to feel better about life—substances, people, ministry, image.

They aren’t just “bad” things as defined by religion. Anything that puts you in a place where you are trying to gain acceptance and love based on what you do or don’t do is bad for us. Instead, there’s a sweet dependence of relationship when we wake up and ask Jesus what we are doing today. And when His peace leaves, so do we. We don’t need an explanation, but rather we start to understand that His peace is a guide for our contentment.

You Are Precious

You Are Precious

Beloved. Friend. Son or daughter. Not just someone to be used for a need He has. Perhaps we can’t understand who we are until we start to see what He has given us. What He sees when He looks at us.

He sees someone for whom He sacrificed everything because He considered us worth having relationship with. He sees none of the mistakes or failures as definition of us, but only sees the worth He has bestowed on us. Something is only worth what people will pay for it. I heard recently about a piece of virtual art that sold for over $60 million. Why? Because someone decided it had value enough to pay a crazy amount of money for it. And God has decided that your worth is valued at such a high price that He was willing to sacrifice His Son, and Jesus was willing to sacrifice Himself.

And this wasn’t just a one-time thing. He gives us His life, whether we treat it with respect or not. He is with us in everything we do or think. And I want to know—what are you communicating about what you think about your worth when you do what you do? That’s not a condemnation, but so many of us act as if we are hated, despised, spat on, worthless, devalued, dirty, and disappointing.

Freedom in Knowing Your Worth

Freedom in Knowing Your Worth

People with whom I work are probably sick of hearing me talk about their identities in Christ. But I find it is such a foundational piece of living that it must be discussed often. We also have been so steeped in lies that the truth of who we are in Christ seems laughable. We go about trying to prove we have value and worth through our productivity, our kindness, or some other circumstance or behavior. But this puts things in the wrong order. We do not love others or achieve success (however that is measured) in order to prove we have value—we must first understand we have value, and then we can behave as one who is loved.

Sometimes we try to use circumstances to prove our worth. We look around at what we have achieved, how productive we are, how we define success and if we have achieved some level of it. This is then supposed to help us understand that we have value. But when we place our value on these things, we end up with two problems. One is that we cannot control a lot of our circumstances, and if we struggle with physical health, financial difficulty, or some other external factor, we can end up deciding we have no worth because we cannot perform in our circumstances as we used to. The other problem is that once we attain whatever level of success we have determined will give us value, there is usually another step to take to keep increasing that value. There is no ending point. If we attain education, power, money or status, there is always another level that we have to keep pushing towards.

Walking with the broken to find hope in Jesus