The Holy Spirit has really been pressing heavy on me with intentional introspection about the value of life. With what I have seen this week in comment sections and in openly self-absorbed videos across the internet, and after a lot of self-examination and prayer, it is time to share what is on my heart, and the clarity we all need about the value of life. For me, it is a very brief thing to lay out, probably because it really is this simple.
I kept watching people declare how much they value life while performing it for a camera, and I kept seeing the same gap I have seen in rooms after a funeral. The words are large. The life underneath them is still trying to prove it counts.
Most people would say, “I value life. I value my life and the lives of others.” Do you, really? Do your actions match your words? Does the way you live, and what you actually prioritize when no one is watching, flow with the language that pours out of your mouth? After years of caregiving and death, contradiction and hypocrisy are what I see and hear loudest underneath those proclamations.
Start here, with something most people repeat and almost no one has watched all the way through: you can’t take it with you. I have walked multiple people home, and watched what happens to the accumulation of a person’s life once they are gone, multiple times. It is the same every. Single. Time.
I have sorted the drawers, boxed the clothes that still held their shape, stood in rooms that were suddenly just rooms, thrown their accumulated papers and hoards into dumpsters, donated their entire collection of things, from furniture to decor to tools to dishes and kitchen utensils, and then had the strange, quiet work of erasing them from the system. Accounts closed. Names removed. Mail stopped. Policies terminated. A whole existence reduced, piece by piece, to paperwork that no longer needed a living signature.
All of those things made up someone’s entire reality. At the end, it very literally does not matter. It is a problem to be handled by those left behind. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but that is what it is reduced to by the very system that requires it to be erased.
That is the part people do not understand when they say they value life. They think the value lives in the pile, the house, the collection, the upgrades, the image, the proof that they were here and that it counted. Then death comes, and the pile does not follow. It sits there waiting for someone else to decide what was precious and what was junk.
The things that felt like identity become labor for the living. The system that recognized them yesterday does not recognize them today. What remains is not the accumulation. What remains is whether the life itself was ever received as gift before it had to be dismantled.
I am not saying beauty or provision is sin. I am saying I have stood on the other side of the sentence people treat like a proverb, and it is not poetry. It is an inventory. If your sense of a life’s worth is tied to what can be stacked, displayed, purchased, or posted, you have not yet seen what a life looks like when all of that is taken off the table and only the person is left. And then even the person is gone, and you are the one closing the tabs.
We say we value life, using the language of empathy. We mourn the approved tragedies. We claim we are here for those who are mourning or struggling, but when it gets ugly, few if any show up. We post the right words at a safe distance and call it compassion.
Most of that is performance. It lets a person feel righteous without ever having to become poor in spirit. It is easier to signal care than to receive your own unadorned existence as gift. It is easier to weep for an abstraction than to sit still with the breath you already have and say thank You.
Real valuing is quieter, and it costs more. In fact, it is the most expensive thing about a truly full and well-lived life, mentally and emotionally speaking. It shows up in whether you can look at what is already in your hands, the body that still carries you, the ordinary Tuesday that arrived with nothing extra attached, the relationship that has not left, the roof, the meal, the morning light, and call it enough.
If gratitude only arrives after the next purchase, the next trip, the next upgrade, the next experience layered on top of the last one, then it was never the life itself being cherished. It was the accessories. Consumerism has become the liturgy of a people who do not know how to receive. We keep adding because we have not yet learned how to hold what we already have with true gratitude, be fulfilled by mere existence, and truly behold the grace and wonder of God.
I am not speaking from self-righteousness, or pointing fingers. I am encouraging a different perspective, after having reviewed this in myself over the past week. There have been seasons when I had little and still knew I was held, and seasons when I had more and still felt empty because I was using the more as proof that my life counted. The Spirit will not let that contradiction stay hidden.
Hypocrisy is not only found in pulpits and institutions. It lives in the gap between what we claim life is worth and how we actually treat the portion we were given. If you cannot value yourself and your life with little, then you have no idea the value of life.
Scarcity is the most honest and most important teacher we will ever have. When the extras fall away and the heart still says thank You, the performance ends and the knowing begins. The Spirit’s fullness does not settle on a life that is still trying to purchase its own meaning.
This is not a call to pretend poverty is holy, or that beauty and provision are suspect. God gives good gifts. He has abundance for us and wants to pour it out on us. The question is whether the gift can still be recognized when it is stripped of packaging.
Scripture has always known this. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” The rich fool in Luke 12 did not die because he had barns. He died because he thought the barns were the life. Performative empathy works the same way. It builds bigger language around suffering while remaining unable to honor the ordinary miracle of still being here.
I am not writing this from a mountain. I am writing it from the middle of a life that has been reduced more than once, by loss, by illness, by the long work of caregiving, by the kind of grief that does not come with a caption. Those years did not make me superior. They made the counterfeit obvious.
You find out what you actually worship when there is nothing left to add. You find out whether life was ever sacred to you, or only useful as material for a feeling. You find out who you are, and who God is, when you recognize that nothing matters without relationship with Him.
If this lands hard, let it. The Holy Spirit does not press something this heavy so we can decorate it and move on. The invitation is simple and severe: receive the life you already have. Stop needing more of it in order to feel grateful for the portion you were given. Everything else is just dressing up the fact that we have not yet learned the price of the thing we claim to love.