Defining Value

Baseball season is upon us. For me, that always brings back memories of my mostly undistinguished career, which peaked in 9th grade when I was named MVP of my junior varsity team. It was a pretty dubious honor, considering that we had an 0-10 record and I was the starting pitcher in nine of those losses. Our coach didn’t even know my full name. When he announced the award at the spring banquet, he just pointed at me and said, “This year’s most valuable player is … Al.” The trophy did include my last name, but it was misspelled.

What does it really mean to be valuable? Men in particular seem to place a lot of weight on performance, gauging our self-worth by the world’s “standards” of success. I heard a great talk on this topic by former big league pitcher Dave Dravecky. An all-star lefthander, Dravecky once thought success depended on his arm, which earned him big bucks by getting opposing hitters out.

Then the cold reality of disease struck: Cancer took Dravecky’s left arm and suddenly his livelihood was gone. He started asking some tough questions: What gives a man his identity and value? Does that value disappear when he can no longer produce? Or is a man’s worth deeper than what he has and what he does?

Dravecky held up a baseball card with his picture on the front and asked, “What’s a Dave Dravecky worth?” The answer, he had discovered, lies not in statistics produced on the field and printed on the back of a piece of card stock. The answer lies in the value God gave him as one of His children, redeemed from sin by Jesus Christ.

In his book The Worth of a Man, Dravecky wrote: “It wasn’t until I struggled through the emotional turmoil caused by the loss of my arm that I came to know I was worth more than what I had accomplished, more than what I had gained or lost. I am a man created in the image of God, in the process of being recreated in the image of Christ. That gives me unimaginable worth, regardless of what I can or cannot do.”

I’ve found much encouragement in Dravecky’s story. I know my worth comes from the Creator of all things, who loved me despite my failures and rebellion against Him. As God said to the people of Israel – and by extension, to those who follow Him today – “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). It matters not that my coach didn’t know my name, because God does.