Ryan Karp: Jesus gave me a sense of self-worth that I never had

At two or three o’clock in the morning, I saw the approaching lights around the house.

I shouted as hard as I could to them all the cusses I knew.

“You’re crazy! Stop it! ”

The police arrived – “violation of public order” …

Born into a rather interesting family, I have always known that my parents’ identities were slightly different. My father is Jewish, my mother is non-Jewish. You know, Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday, Passover is a Jewish holiday. But Christmas and Easter were Christian holidays. So I kind of knew that we were celebrating the holidays of both my parents. The spiritual side of the issue was not there.

Once I was sent to a camp in the summer. I was probably six or seven years old. My mom took me there for the day. I would return home from camp and walk around the house singing the song that I was taught there. “Jesus loves me, this I know..” My dad got angry. “It can’t be that my little Jewish son would come home from camp singing about Jesus!”

I definitely tried to find myself as a teenager. I believed in God, I prayed from time to time. I was very uncomfortable in my own skin. I knew myself incredibly well. I think you could say that when my first year of college began, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “None of your friends love you. They just put up with you.” I tried to assert myself through cooler behavior, making more money, and it never worked. No matter how much confirmation or evidence I got from other people, it was never enough. And I think it reached its climax.

I was at a friend’s house, there were a lot of people. I think we were just spending the evening, I was about eighteen. I was tired for some reason and fell asleep on the couch downstairs. And I woke up … It was about two o’clock in the morning, and they were still awake. In fact, they weren’t even in the house anymore. Because of my fears and what I was experiencing, I was very worried that I had missed out something. So I went outside and started looking for them. I thought: “Of course, here’s another example that they don’t think of me at all. I don’t bother them. ”

And so I stand outside a house in Montgomery County, Maryland, screaming as hard as I can. All the curses I knew came from my lips. I saw the approaching lights from all directions. Finally one of them heard me, came and said: “What are you doing? You are crazy! Stop it! ” The police arrived – “disorderly conduct”. And I was very ashamed because I had drawn my friends into it.

So I finally broke down. I went to my mom and said, “I don’t know what to do because I can’t keep getting bad grades, I can’t keep ruining my relationships.” And she said, “Maybe you should see a psychologist.”

I did not want to go to a psychologist, because that would mean that I have a problem, although inside myself I knew for sure that I had problems. And she sent me to a Christian counseling center. There I was able to talk about all my problems, and for the first time someone understood them. When we communicated, I began to understand that I had based all my self-esteem on other people. I realized how shaky is this foundation. Because people are not perfect. I’m not perfect. And basing your self-worth on other people who are very ambiguous is not how you should live.

But what he actually did, he introduced me to this guy, Jesus, whom I called Yeshua, who I was told about and who was shown to me in the Bible. And what He did for me – He gave me victory. What He did for me – He made me a normal person, and at the same time nothing was required of me but to recognize Him.

He gave me self-esteem. He gave me this stability that I was looking for. I suddenly met this guy who was as stable as possible. And I realized that I no longer need to struggle to assert myself, I don’t need to try again and again to be normal.

I looked at the world as a half-empty glass, and with Yeshua I looked at the world as a glass that was filled to the brim.

Source: https://ieshua.org/rajan-karp-iisus-dal-mne-chuvstvo-sobstvennogo-dostoinstva.htm