The other day, I received an e-mail that went along the following lines:
Dear Customer,
we have reason to believe that the password to your bank account with us has been recently compromised. For your security, please go to (insert website here) and change your password.
Sincerely ....
On face value, this e-mail looks legit enough. Everything in the e-mail is possible - there is nothing in the e-mail itself that would indicate that it isn't legit. In fact, the e-mail itself implies that it is true. However, and here is the important point, the e-mail itself does not have the authority to say whether it is true or not. That's kind of like me saying that I am the best person in the world, and then, when you ask, "says who?" I answer, "Says me." Similarly, for this e-mail, it cannot be the judge of whether it is valid or not. Something outside of this e-mail has to either say: yes, this e-mail is valid; or no, it is a bogus phishing scam. In this case, it was a phishing e-mail. The way I could tell was that it pretended to be from the Bank of America, and I happen to live in Canada. What happened here is that I had a fact (that I live in Canada) that was not part of the e-mail. I was able to use this external fact to determine that the e-mail was invalid. If I didn't have this fact, I would not have been able to tell whether the e-mail was or was not valid.
We all want to believe that we are valuable, that we are worth loving, that we are valid. But the question is: who says we are? If I say that I am worth loving, that I am a valid human being, that I matter, that is basically the same thing as the phishing e-mail above saying I am valid. In and of myself, I have no authority to say that I matter, that I am valid, that I am worth loving. Even if we can't put this feeling into words, it is something we feel: we are never satisfied with our self-talks and our self-esteem. We are always looking and clamouring for someone else to say: yes, you are worth loving. One of the good gifts that we can give others is to affirm them and say, yes, you are worth loving. And that is worth so much more, because it comes from someone other than themselves. It is something external to them that says so. Yet, there is still one issue here: who says that humanity is worth loving? We may say that human beings are worth loving, but given that we are ourselves human beings, we have no authority to say that. We need someone external, someone outside of ourselves, someone outside of humanity to say that.
I believe that we are worth loving. Who says so?
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
- 1 John 4:9-10