Your Perception is Their Image

Often, I think I make the faulty assumption that every teenager I encounter has a negative image of themselves. I’m not denying that the perception of low self-worth is a very real and common issue among young adults, but it is wrong to assume that this is the default state for most students.

I have no data to back this up, but my gut is that most students with an undervalued opinion of themselves have come to that conclusion with the help of other people. Maybe it’s the mom that treats them like an idiot, the dad who didn’t stick around for them, or the sibling that torture them. Perhaps it is their classmates or the neighborhood kids. Whatever it is, most of us decide we are worthless because we’ve been told it so many times we’ve forgotten our reasons to disagree.

I remember looking in the mirror as a freshman and thinking, “Yeah, I’m buff… check out these guns.” I was pretty convinced that I was in pretty awesome shape, which is hilarious when you look at the pictures of this spindly kid who had yet to really hit his muscle mass growth spurt. I was frame 3 of the above cartoon, and I was happy about it.

That is, until some of the older guys at church laughed at me for walking around with my shirt unbuttoned like Nick Lachay. Suddenly I was a dweeb, a weak scrawny kid again. What others saw is how I began to see myself.

But that uncovers a simple truth. We have the ability to change the perception of our students by helping them to see what we see. It’s what Jesus does. He takes the great virtues that we can only vaguely see and promises to bring clarity to them (1 Corinthians 13:12). In his latest book, Father Fiction, Donald Miller rights in the first chapter about the profound impact a youth pastor had on him growing up.

He was somebody who stepped into my life and helped me believe I was here on purpose and for a purpose. I don’t think there are very many things more important than this when we are kids.

Don’t underestimate your ability to influence the image a student has of himself or herself. What you see now might be what they see the next time they look in the mirror.