Affirming One Another’s Significance
In the last post, we discussed our inherent significance as bearers of God’s image and recipients of His grace. This post looks at how we are meant to affirm that significance in others.
While our significance is inherent and God-given, God intends it to be affirmed by significant others—parents, spouse, church, and friends. A child needs his parents to recognize and communicate his significance, and a wife needs her husband to convey how much she matters to him.
God aims to meet our experiential need for significance through meaningful relationships, and affirming love is the most powerful way to fulfill this need.
God aims to meet our experiential need for significance through meaningful relationships, and affirming love is the most powerful way to fulfill this need.
Affirmation isn’t offering empty compliments but expressing an honest appreciation for what we see in the other person. It’s a genuine and heartfelt acknowledgment of their worth. Affirmation uplifts the other person. It strengthens one’s identity.
When someone’s need for significance goes unmet, they can lose their sense of identity—their sense of self. This can cause one to doubt her value and second-guess her strengths or think thoughts like, “I’m useless,” “I must be a terrible parent,” “I’m a failure as a spouse,” or “I’m letting my family down.”
Practical Application
In our relationships, we look for opportunities to affirm others through words and actions. When you think of your aging parents, husband or wife, or adolescent son or daughter, words of affirmation touch their hearts, help meet their need for significance, and affirm their identity.
Our children, with their wide eyes and curious hearts, always seek affirmation. So, build them up, touch their hearts, and tell them how proud you are and how much they mean to you.
Our children, with their wide eyes and curious hearts, always seek affirmation. So, build them up, touch their hearts, and tell them how proud you are and how much they mean to you.
And don’t only affirm their beauty or cuteness. Affirm what God wants to build in them. Affirm their wise choices. Affirm their faith. Affirm good character—honesty, humility, compassion. Affirm their strengths.
Don’t only affirm their beauty or cuteness. Affirm what God wants to build in them.
A husband can make his wife feel appreciated by thanking her for her contributions to the family and home, recognizing her dedication to their children and her role as a partner and mother, listening to her daily experiences and affirming her professional skills, valuing her strengths, perspectives, and wisdom, and seeking her input on important decisions.
A wife can elevate her husband’s sense of importance by genuinely admiring his strengths, rejoicing in his accomplishments, acknowledging his skills or talents, and affirming his leadership and contributions within the family, especially in his roles as a husband and father.
Even at work or with our neighbors. A simple word of genuine appreciation can be a lifeline to someone drowning in self-doubt.