Values

When I was in ap government, I learned that something's value is what others would pay for it. I think there is an important distinction between what others pay and what you would pay. Many times when you think about price, you think of the little yellow sticker underneath or in the object. How much do you think about your own price though?

How much are you worth? This isn't a rhetorical question either. Think about it. Do you think you underrate yourself or overprice your true value? I know that I will tend to think that I am priceless and that nobody could buy me. Then I think about the human traffickers around the world who do business by placing prices on actual people. While you may think that you are essentially priceless, others may not. Again, I ask what you are really worth.

Today in church, the pastor said that the value of your soul is what you love. If what I love is my job or perhaps even my money, I am worth nothing more than what my job actually means to people. Likewise, you
might think that loving money makes you valuable since money should be worth a lot. Yet how much would people pay for money? Definitely not their life or likewise, not their soul.

Perhaps what we love are our friends and family and even distant relatives who we rarely ever see. What is your worth then? Maybe it is the worth of all those people combined. Then in turn, they could love high value things which makes your worth higher. Yet that is still, in a sense, a finite number. What then should we love to maximize the value of our soul?

If we remember that our value is what someone else would pay for it, then we need to find something to love that is so precious that someone would trade all their worth for our soul. But what or exactly WHO do we love? When I think about this issue I can only think of the all-loving God. After all, he paid in full for us which makes us all the more valuable to Him.

To take this one step further, think about what paying for us meant for God.  God loved his son, Jesus with all his heart.  Doesn't that mean that his worth was placed in Jesus?  But then He willingly gave up Jesus for us, people who didn't love and wouldn't love in the way that Jesus could.  God willingly gave up what his whole worth in order to give us a chance to walk on a righteous path.

What do you love?

Define Tolerance?

Who is more tolerant?  An individual who believes that one view is correct but allows others to hold their own opinion or someone who does not hold any strong views but thinks everyone is right?

I first heard this question over this past weekend during my church’s fellowship.  Rather than taking my time to think about the question deeply, I immediately answered that it is one who has strong views but accepts the fact that other will have different views.  I was surprised that a survey of this question resulted in the majority answering the opposite. 

Instead of trying to reason why the majority would say being tolerant is thinking that everyone is right, I focused more on how I felt so strongly that I was right.  At first I was thinking how it was because the first option closely resembled my world view on life so I wanted it to be true.  I didn’t want my “life-philosophy” to be non-tolerant.  I didn’t want to put myself down as the non-tolerant.  But I wanted to move past this selfish conclusion.

Being that the speaker didn’t really put forth any real reason I thought that way, and this was in the beginning of the message, the opener so to speak, I quickly pushed the question back into my mind so as to keep up with the onslaught of history and philosophy that ensued.  Note: I don’t want to give the impression of a bad message that night since I thoroughly enjoyed the analysis of the progression of thought through the human eras.

After the night was over and I got back to my dorm room, I began to think again about the question of tolerance.  I’m sorry if you thought that I had a sure-fire conclusion to this conundrum but I’m afraid that even now I still lack a definitive answer.  For now, I am rather content on standing on the first option but conceding that someone can still make the argument for the second.  For those who read this far, you might notice that this answer is rather biased being that I want to tolerant and therefore allow others to hold their own views, but still believing that I am right.

Please comment on what you think might be tolerance.