VALIDATION - FINDING WHERE WE BELONG

What is it that makes us human? I think that an essential part of it is our quest for social validation and approval. Consequently, we are like sponges soaking up social cues and responses. It is a little like driving a car. We automatically soak up the optical stimuli to form objective pictures of the world around us.

We do not want imaginary pictures of our world. While imagination has its place, in a car, it will lead to a wreck. Instead, we need accuracy.

When it comes to our social and moral pictures we naturally and obsessively construct of the world, we also crave accuracy. To flow comfortably through our social environment, is like navigating successfully through traffic.

As we grow older, we begin to form mental constructs of ourselves in relation to the surrounding world. We not only need accurate mental constructs of the world, we also need an accurate definition of ourselves in relationship to the world. We seek to answer the questions, “who am I?” and “how should I behave?” It’s part of what it means to be human.

After we emerge from the womb of our parent’s house, we begin to add other questions: “What makes me a good, significant, and worthwhile person?” and “Why am I here?” For some of us, the nest is so uncomfortable that we begin to ask this question earlier. For others, this question hasn’t ever penetrated our consciousness. However, in either case, the question is still there and needs to be answered, although we will find different ways to answer this question and to fulfill this need.

In “The Significant Life,” George M. Weaver illustrates that we are so crazed to achieve significance, or at least name recognition, that we will commit acts that bring us condemnation rather than commendation:

·       In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, our quest for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the moral dictates of conscience. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous.” (45)

This drive for significance can even override all other affections. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:

·       “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)

By attaching himself to someone greater, Chapman elevated himself. Was it “low self-esteem” or merely Chapman’s own way to achieve what everyone else is trying to achieve – significance and self-validation?

Although we might attempt to fulfill this need in anti-social, even self-destructive ways, it seems that it is a basic human need. The late and esteemed rabbi, Abraham Heschel, had claimed that our needs also include finding understanding and meaning:

·       It’s not enough for me to be able to say ‘I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

As the salmon “knows” to return to the place where it had been born to create more young, we too sense that there is a role we must fulfill and a place where we belong. However, the search for our spawning-ground can become obsessive and frustrating if we are unable to find it.

We might even despair and give up the search. We might even conclude that the spawning-ground for which we search is mythical or completely subjective. Or it might simply be that we had started buttoning our shirt in the wrong hole, condemning every subsequent button into the wrong slot – the cause of our frustration. Some will eventually re-button their shirt, starting with the right hole, while others will never go back to the start. It’s just too painful to face the fact that we have been in error about everything.

However, decades of depression and panic attacks drove me back to my first button. I had been obsessively trying to re-position the top buttons with little success, and it was obvious. My life just didn’t work, I was suffering, and there was no denying it.

I had been like a sponge, soaking up whatever social or material feedback that might enable me to successfully navigate this painful existence, but wherever I looked, I couldn’t find the place where I belonged. This led me to Israel, where I became a Zionist. It then led to seek for the perfect community among Israel’s many kibbutzim where I would be loved and validated, but no such place was able to answer my questions or meet my inflamed needs.

It was only some years later, as I was bleeding to death from a chainsaw injury, that my buttons were torn away from the holes where I had deposited them. God was there as I lay in a pool of my own blood, manifesting Himself with such love, joy, and peace that I was ecstatic. Nothing else mattered. I just knew that I had to find Him to discover His identity, convinced beyond doubting that this was the place I belonged, that He was the One who had given birth to me and it was to Him that I must return.

I was afraid that this might be about Jesus, the last place I had ever dreamed of visiting. However, 41 years ago, I became convinced that He is my significance, validation, and my home, the very place I belong. It is from Him that I have come forth; it is to Him that I return.