Locating Identity in a world of hard currency.

Everything has a value, and all too often the we base that value on how much people earn, what people wear, what they drive, where they go on holiday, even what they do for a living.

Is this how God values us? Is it how we should value ourselves or others?

Last night a cartoon spoke to me. I kicked back my heels, slapped in a video, settled into an evening of soft entertainment, and then it hit me. This bug was talking sense! Let me explain...

Have you ever seen Antz? It's the tale of a worker ant called Z-4195, a little bulb-eyed slip of an ant, appropriately voiced by Woody Allen. Z (pronounced ‘Zee') isn't like other ants. He'd like to get on with the job of hulking bits of sugar around his colony, but he can't. He's lost his appetite for work. Maybe, he explains to his therapist, it's because he's the middle child of 5 million. But he's lost faith in his place in the system. Heck, these days he can barely lift more than ten times his own bodyweight.

Z, you see, has woken up to an uncomfortable truth - the knowledge that he's just one ant in a billion. If he shuffled off his ‘anty' coil, would the colony grind to a halt? Would anyone even notice?

Now, I admit this is foolish. I wasn't supposed to have bought the existential angst - I was meant to rush out and buy the movie merchandise. But, like it or not, Z got me thinking. When push comes to shove, what am I really worth in the world? Am I, as Marx would have it, just a tiny cog in a vast machine?

A friend once told me that if you stripped a human body to the bare sum of its constituent parts - water, minerals and the stuff you ate for breakfast - it would be worth about nine pence, which I have calculated to be roughly the price of a Tesco's doughnut. I worry about my friend sometimes. But he has a point. Physically, we are worthless. Man is dust, say the Psalmists; our days vanish like smoke.

Few people, of course, would place human life on the same value scale as jam-filled pastries. We make emotional investments in one another; we have social responsibilities; we go to work, support families, grow businesses, discover love and return it. We are more than economics. We are people. That, at the very least, elevates us above ants.

And yet this, too, is not entirely true. We know from experience that we're not living on a level playing field. Money talks. Think of Bill Gates. Half the world's population subsists on less than a dollar a day and few people seem to care. But Bill is worth $60billion and the world beats at his door. Or take Jennifer Lopez's body, allegedly insured at a cool billion dollars. This fact alone (whether true or not) makes her hot media property and fuels a relentless thirst for her image as a celebrity. Most of us can barely imagine sitting on Bill's vast fortune but we know instinctively that money and identity are linked. And if this is true then it begs a further question: where does our own identity come from? What fuels our own sense of value? Is it in the clothes we buy? Or the company we keep? Perhaps it's the job we do and the kudos it brings. Do I feel better about myself when I get a pay rise? Do I wish that I could move to a more up-and-coming area of town, or buy a bigger flat? If the answer to these questions is yes, then we risk being sucked into a Z-shaped equation where what we do for a living, and how much we earn, are the primary factors in making us what we are. And if that's the case, then we may join hands with Jean Paul Sartre, and shrug resignedly and, like him, declare: ‘Here we all are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and... there is nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.' 

In this sense, it makes no difference whether we're addicted to work or whether we despise it. Since, in either case, work determines our sense of self-value (and, to take Sartre's view, since we live in a valueless universe) both effectively amount to the same thing.

But as Christians, we know that there is a reason for existing. God decided that you and I were of such great value to him that he would send his only Son to die a criminal's death that we might live! However you look at it, the life of the Son of God to buy your life should make Bill Gates' fortune pale into insignificance. This means that our sense of self-worth is no longer bound up in our work, wealth, power, or status, but in God Himself. Paul says, ‘Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God . . . you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.' (Colossians 3:2-3, 9)

Fundamentally, we know that what we have comes from God. More than that, we are God's. We belong to him. ‘Our citizenship is in heaven,' says Paul to the Philippians. By the Spirit, he adds in Ephesians, we are children of God, and this makes us his heirs. This truth rescues us from the self-doubt and confusion that dogs our work-crazy modern world. We no longer need to fret about what value our boss dumps on us. Think twice, even, about that tasty promotion. Christ's answer is to loosen our grip on all these things and, as the rich man in Luke 12 famously failed to do, give them up for a new identity in him.

"Be on your guard against all kinds of greed - a persons worth DOES NOT consist in the abundance of all they possess[TV1] "

I have been in the world of paid employment for 30 years, and I have been a Christian for just 3 years longer. Being a Christian has NOT been an easy option: I have worked in situations that have been stressful, corrupt, unfair and unjust. A world where profit, process and price have been put before people, where people I have loved have suffered dreadfully through illness, neglect, abuse and extortion, and where people who have caused much suffering to others appear to have thrived. On the surface, my life is no different to that of many who have been working for 30 years- I have experienced injustice, unfairness and insecurity and I know and have known, great love, joy and fulfilment, So how has being a Christian made any difference?

Over this time I have known that I am loved by God who lived as a man, in this same world of extremes. This God has experienced the joys and the pain and he wears on his hands the scars of unfairness and injustice. I have not always felt happy and secure, nor have I always felt that I have lived a victorious life. However what I do know is that I am loved by God who has given me both the strength to endure and the spirit to rejoice; I know that he loves me extravagantly and gives me the will and courage to endure, and the ability to live the life that he has called me to. He enables me to come through the injustice and unfairness without becoming bitter or bent out of shape. The victory he gives me is the power to live in the real world - without being enslaved by it. I too wear scars of unfairness, but thanks to his grace and his spirit, I can wear these as scars of triumph because he gives the power to overcome .

Jill Garrett is Managing Director of Gallup UK and was formerly a head teacher. She and her husband have two children.