Priceless

Last night I went with my best friend to see the Christian band for King and Country's movie Priceless. To give you a quick summary of the plot- a guy is driving a truck across the state, no questions asked. But when he's run off the road, he inspects his "cargo" which turns out to be two Mexican sisters. He delivers them to a man and despite the bad feeling, lets them go. He soon realizes that he has been involved in one of the most horrible practices in our country: human trafficking. He spends the rest of the movie getting them back. At the end, he takes a prostitute into his room and the older sister (who he is now engaged to) comes in and they tell the girl that she is not worth the $100 he paid for her, but priceless.

I'm going to confess that the movie made me cry. They played the song in the movie and these lyrics: "Irreplaceable, unmistakable, incomparable" made me cry. I also cried in the end, where they explain to the prostitute that there is a God who sees that worth in her. I was crying because I don't see myself that way and I think every girl struggles to see themselves that way. But what they said is true. There is a God who sees each girl as a beautiful creation that is absolutely incomparable to any other girl and whose worth is so great that it cannot be measured.

There are two steps to learning to see ourselves as priceless. The first is to stop comparing ourselves to other girls. We do it a lot. We look at so-and-so and think, her hair style is so much better than mine or her body is so much more curvy than mine. We need to stop doing that. Everyone was created differently and there is beauty in our diversity. There are many different kinds of beauty. No one else can be that stunning mix of you that you are.

The second step, at least for me, is the harder one. Girls, we need to stop letting guys tell us how much we are worth. One of the things that is so touching about the Smallbone brothers is that they challenge guys to treat girls with chivalry and to love them extraordinarily. I love that, but ultimately guys are human too. They're going to fail us. This movie came at a point where I was struggling to think of myself as being beautiful and having worth because I was letting a guy tell me how much I was worth and he wasn't telling me I was worth much. And sometimes we can even feel like we aren't worth much just because guys always flirt with our best friend and never with us. Or maybe your friend has a bunch of guy friends who listen to her talk about her problems and you have a grand total of zero of those. That doesn't mean you don't have anything attractive about you. It means that you respect yourself enough to wait for the guy God has for you and that you're so special God wants to keep you from anyone but that guy. On the other hand, perhaps you're in a relationship with a guy who makes you feel like you are just the bomb. That's wonderful, but at some point, he is going to let you down. And in those moments, we have to remember that God still loves you and sees you as beautiful and worthy.

~Clarissa

P.S. I promise to write about actual writing soon.