incredible you

The human brain is incredible, isn’t it? I could reel off loads of statistics about it, but I want you to think for a moment about something.

Anything.

If you’re thinking, “I don’t know what to think about,” then consider your mind magically read. Tadaaa! (Or perhaps I am just playing the probabilities that someone will have thought that and you’ve been made to feel a ‘wow’ moment).

But, silliness aside, do you realise what you just did there? You thought. Your mind took a prompt from me and thought about something. You used a combination of some or all of these: imagination, recollection, perception, reasoning and logic, emotion, self-awareness (and probably loads more beside) to come up with a thought.

That’s incredible. At a chemical / physiological level neurones, chemical changes and electrical impulses combined to create a thought. As I started: the human brain is incredible, isn’t it?

But there’s more than that going on, isn’t there? You had a conscious thought. Consciousness is more than the sum of its parts. There’s a spark of something else going on. I would attribute it to ‘God’, but you might have another explanation for what’s going on. And that explanation uses conscious thoughts…

But you, the essence of you, your soul, your personality, what makes you uniquely you, that’s even more astonishing than your brain (and remember how incredible that is). You are unique (just like all 8 billion of us). There is nobody just like you. Even genetically identical twins are different people with different personalities. You are a one in 8 billion – that’s special.

You are amazing. Never let anyone or anything convince you differently.

Sometimes illness can mask our ability to feel or even believe that about ourselves, so then we may need other people to tell us that. So hear it from me: you are amazing, wonderful, unique and precious beyond measure.

And you are lovable. I don’t mean the cute, cuddly, romantic loveable. I mean that you are someone who is worth loving – the sort of love that wants the best for you at all costs. Love doesn’t exist in the abstract, it only exists when there is someone or something to love. And because you exist, you can be loved and are worth loving.

My Christian faith convinces me that God loves you with that sort of self-sacrificing love – you are loved for who you are, not for what you can do. As adverts for a certain brand of make-up tells us: ‘You’re worth it’.

If someone or something makes you feel or think less than that about yourself then they are liars.

If illness masks your ability to know or feel that about yourself then perhaps it may help you to realise that it’s like putting on someone else’s glasses – it distorts the way we see things, but the thing (how lovely you are) hasn’t changed, just your ability to see it properly.

You read this, and hopefully understood it. It made you think and perhaps feel differently. That’s incredible, isn’t it?

You’re incredible.

incredible you.