Everyone Created by God is Beautiful, Everyone Counts

“I believe every flower created by God is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I believe that if all the flowers wished to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be enameled with lovely hues.”   

St. Therese of Lisieux

Just as every flower of the field counts, so too, every person in this world counts. There are no exceptions. Yet there are those of us who deep down don’t believe we really count. We don’t simply see others as roses or lilies and ourselves as violets or daisies: We see ourselves as weeds.

Weeds certainly do not count in our world. We do everything possible to eradicate them. If we feel like weeds instead of like flowers, there may be several reasons.

As children we may have been a dumping ground for one or both of our parents. If a parent consistently found fault with us, unloading all of their garbage onto us but not onto our siblings, we may have internalized the belief that we didn’t count in our families. If we weren’t allowed to speak our truth, or express our feelings then we likely came to believe that what we thought, did or felt didn’t matter to mom or dad, God or anyone. This type of thinking may have become a way of life for us. If we believed we were like weeds that deserved to be stepped on, when we reached school, this belief may have invited bullies to dump on us, too, thus reinforcing the belief that we didn’t count.

It’s also possible that we might have been told that gay people, or black people, or non-Christians, or women or immigrants don’t count; that they, too, are the weeds of society. If we fell into any category of societal “weeds,” we may have internalized the hate we were hearing from adults.

A gay child, for example, can’t change his/her feelings of attraction for members of the same sex. If mom or dad is spouting off hateful comments about gay people, the child has really only one choice: He/she has to deny and hide what they feel and who they are. Their truth then becomes a desperate secret. They are filled with shame, which leads to self-hatred. They live in fear of being found-out by mom or dad and then abandoned. The more that they hear things like “All gay people go to hell,” or “You better not be gay because you’ll never get a good job if you are,” or “If I ever found out my son or daughter was gay, I’d shoot them on the spot,” the more they believe they are purposeless; that they are a mistake, that they simply don’t count or have a chance in this life.

People who come to believe that they are somehow inherently defective face a grim future if they continue to believe the lies that were pounded into their heads as children. If we believe the lies, we are faced with either developing strong coping skills, or weighing the option of suicide. When suicide is out of the question, then we must somehow, someway minimalize our pain. If we are to survive, we believe we must turn off our pain—completely. We then developed tremendous coping skills to keep our feelings frozen. We’re afraid that allowing ourselves to feel will indeed kill us. What we don’t realize is that when we’re hiding a deadly secret and keeping our feelings frozen, we force ourselves into deep levels of depression. Speaking and feeling our truth are the antidotes to this depression.

Many of us have chosen to cope our entire lives instead of voicing and feeling our truth. We’ve refused to grieve our loses and settled for living in fear and depression. Sadly, we’ve learned to cope inwardly and outwardly by denying the ugliness of our reality. We learned to smile whenever we really needed to cry. We learned to be “fine” when everything was really wrong.

Does this sound in any way familiar? Well then it’s time to stop believing we don’t count. We do count. We have the right to feel and speak our truth. We need to feel when we are hurt and we need to say how we feel. Everyone counts-- No exceptions. Feel and speak your truth and allow your soul to shine!