10. Why Would It Benefit You to Study Essentialism?
Because the Lord loves you and wants you to be happy.
That is my answer as a Christian Essentialist.
Not because God needs you to worship Him.
Not because you must prove your obedience.
Not because you need to earn His approval.
And certainly not because you must become an Essentialist before you deserve His love.
He already loves you.
Within Christian Essentialism, we believe God loves humanity without requiring recognition, reciprocation, worship, or conversion.
Only God knows why someone does not believe in Him or chooses to reject Him.
And we believe He continues seeking ways for people to encounter love through others, even when they never recognize Him as its source.
Essentialism itself is available to everyone, regardless of religious belief.
The Lens—Empathy, Truth, Joy, Kindness, and Anti-Greed—belongs to no religious institution.
Anyone can learn to practice it.
Anyone can benefit from examining their life through it.
And anyone deserves the opportunity to discover a different way of living.
That is why I prefer asking, “Why would it benefit you to study Essentialism?” rather than, “Why should you study Essentialism?”
The distinction matters.
Essentialism is an invitation.
Not an obligation.
I am not interested in convincing people that they must study Essentialism to become worthy of love.
I want them to understand that they may already be carrying beliefs that cause them pain, shame, guilt, or unnecessary suffering.
And they deserve the opportunity to examine those beliefs.
They deserve to discover whether another way is possible.
What Have You Been Taught?
Many of the things we believe about ourselves were taught to us before we were old enough to question them.
We learned what made adults happy.
We learned what caused punishment.
We learned which emotions were acceptable.
We learned when we were allowed to speak.
And we learned what we were expected to sacrifice to maintain the approval of others.
Some of those lessons were helpful.
Others were not.
You may have learned that love must be earned.
That rest is laziness.
That saying no is selfish.
That kindness requires you to tolerate mistreatment.
That your value depends upon your usefulness.
That making a mistake means you are a bad person.
Or that suffering is proof that you are taking responsibility.
You may have carried those beliefs for years without recognizing how much they have affected your life.
Perhaps you have become accustomed to feeling guilty whenever you rest.
Perhaps you apologize for having needs.
Perhaps you remain in harmful relationships because you believe leaving would make you unkind.
Perhaps you continue punishing yourself for mistakes you have already acknowledged and corrected.
And perhaps you have never considered that these beliefs might be wrong.
Not because you lack intelligence.
Not because you are weak.
But because the things we learn early can become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as things we learned.
They begin to feel like Truth.
Essentialism invites us to examine them.
The Lens Begins With Ourselves
We often discuss the Lens in terms of how we treat other people.
We practice Empathy toward those who are suffering.
We tell the Truth.
We respond with Kindness.
We protect opportunities for Joy.
And we reject Greed when it encourages exploitation or domination.
But the Lens must also be applied inwardly.
You are included among the people who deserve your Empathy, Truth, Joy, Kindness, and Anti-Greed.
That may sound obvious.
For some people, it is not.
They have learned to extend understanding to everyone except themselves.
They forgive mistakes in others while treating their own mistakes as permanent evidence of failure.
They encourage others to rest while believing they must remain productive.
They defend other people’s boundaries while feeling guilty about establishing their own.
They recognize cruelty when it is directed at someone else but struggle to recognize it in the way they treat themselves.
The Lens gives us a different way to approach that problem.
Empathy allows us to understand why we believed what we believed.
We can consider what we knew at the time, what we experienced, and what choices were available to us.
Truth allows us to acknowledge when those beliefs have caused harm.
We do not have to defend something merely because it has been familiar for a long time.
Kindness allows us to learn without humiliating ourselves.
We can correct mistakes without deciding that we deserve cruelty.
Joy reminds us that something good remains possible.
Our lives do not have to become endless projects of identifying what is wrong.
And Anti-Greed prevents us from demanding more from ourselves than we reasonably need or can give.
We do not have to become perfect.
We do not have to heal immediately.
We do not have to transform every part of our lives at once.
And we do not have to make ourselves suffer to prove that we are serious about changing.
Together, these virtues create the conditions in which we can begin examining painful truths.
Not without discomfort.
But without adding unnecessary cruelty to the process.
Reduce the Suffering, Not the Pain
This is one of the principles I want people to understand about Essentialism.
Reduce the suffering, not the pain.
Pain is not always something we can prevent.
Sometimes recognizing the Truth hurts.
Discovering that a relationship was harmful may bring grief.
Acknowledging a mistake may bring regret.
Recognizing that we spent years believing something untrue may bring anger or disappointment.
And changing our lives may require us to leave behind things that once felt safe or familiar.
Essentialism does not promise to remove that pain.
Nor should it.
Pain can tell us that something matters.
It can help us recognize loss.
It can accompany the process of understanding what happened and deciding what must change.
But suffering can become greater than the pain itself when we begin punishing ourselves for experiencing it.
We may decide that we were foolish for trusting someone.
We may feel ashamed because we did not recognize a problem sooner.
We may insist that we should have known better.
Or we may deny ourselves comfort because we believe we must suffer before we deserve relief.
Those responses do not necessarily help us understand what happened.
They may simply add another layer of pain.
The Lens offers an alternative.
We can acknowledge that something hurt without deciding that we deserved it.
We can recognize that we made a mistake without making that mistake our identity.
We can grieve what we have lost without demanding that we stop grieving immediately.
And we can take responsibility for our choices without sentencing ourselves to endless punishment.
The goal is not to make painful truths painless. It is to make them possible to face without unnecessary suffering.
This is how Essentialism creates room for healing.
It gives us permission to examine what hurts while continuing to treat ourselves as people worthy of Love.
You May Discover That Better Is Enough
There is another reason I believe studying Essentialism can be beneficial.
It changes what we understand a better life to mean.
Some people expect transformation to be grand.
They imagine that healing will bring wealth, recognition, power, admiration, or a dramatic reversal of everything that has happened to them.
They want proof that their suffering was worthwhile.
They want the people who hurt them to recognize what they lost.
They want the world to acknowledge that they deserved better.
I understand those desires.
But Essentialism does not promise that every injustice will be answered with a spectacular reward.
Sometimes the improvement is much quieter.
You wake up without immediately feeling afraid.
You enjoy your breakfast.
You recognize that you do not have to explain yourself to someone determined to misunderstand you.
You establish a boundary and discover that the world does not end.
You make a mistake, correct it, and continue with your day.
You spend an afternoon doing something you enjoy without feeling that you must justify the time.
You laugh.
You rest.
You begin looking forward to tomorrow.
These changes may not impress anyone.
They may not make you wealthy or famous.
They may not give you power over the people who once controlled you.
And that may cause some people to reject them.
Because Greed can convince us that improvement is not worthwhile unless it increases our status or gives us something greater than what others possess.
But a peaceful life does not have to be impressive to be valuable.
A better life does not have to be extraordinary to be worth living.
For someone who has spent years living with fear, shame, guilt, or exhaustion, an ordinary peaceful day can be an extraordinary gift.
And the ability to enjoy that day without demanding something more may be one of the clearest expressions of Anti-Greed.
Internal Jubilee
Within Christian Essentialism, Jubilee represents the ending of punishment, the cancellation of debts, the return of what has been taken, and the freeing of those who have been bound.
We often discuss Jubilee in terms of communities, institutions, and relationships.
But we must also apply it to ourselves.
Some of us continue punishing ourselves long after the original circumstances have ended.
We carry guilt for things we could not control.
We remain ashamed of mistakes we have already corrected.
We deny ourselves happiness because we believe we have not suffered enough.
And we treat peace as something we must earn through additional hardship.
What would happen if we stopped?
Not if we denied what happened.
Not if we refused responsibility.
And not if we pretended that the pain had disappeared.
What would happen if we simply stopped adding punishment to it?
If we acknowledged what was true, made the repairs available to us, and allowed ourselves to continue living?
That is what I mean by applying Jubilee inwardly.
You can end the punishment without denying the pain.
You can remember what happened without making the memory a sentence you must serve forever.
You can acknowledge your mistakes without surrendering your dignity.
You can recognize that something was taken from you without allowing that loss to define everything that remains.
And you can begin experiencing Joy before every wound has healed.
That is not a refusal of responsibility.
It is a recognition that punishment is not the purpose of life.
An Invitation to Another Way
So why would it benefit you to study Essentialism?
Because you may have been taught things that have hurt you without even knowing it.
Because you deserve the opportunity to question those teachings.
Because you deserve tools that help you recognize what is true without making the discovery another source of cruelty.
Because you deserve to understand your own worth without purchasing it through suffering.
And because you deserve the possibility of Joy.
Within Christian Essentialism, I believe God wants this for you because He loves you.
Not because you have earned His attention.
Not because you have promised to worship Him.
And not because you have agreed to become an Essentialist.
He loves you.
And I believe He wants you to have the opportunity to live well.
You may discover that the changes Essentialism encourages are smaller than you expected.
You may not become wealthy.
You may not receive recognition.
You may not see everyone who hurt you held accountable in the way you hoped.
But you may find yourself becoming less afraid.
Less ashamed.
Less dependent upon someone else’s approval.
More willing to establish boundaries.
More comfortable acknowledging mistakes.
And more capable of recognizing the good things already present in your life.
You may discover that you can experience pain without turning it into endless suffering.
And you may begin sharing that understanding with others.
That is how internal healing becomes external healing.
We learn to practice the Lens toward ourselves.
And then we become better equipped to practice it toward the world.
Reduce the suffering, not the pain.
Because the purpose of learning to live through the Lens is not to create a life without difficulty.
It is to create a life in which difficulty does not prevent us from recognizing and experiencing Joy.
And sometimes, that quieter, gentler, better life is more than enough.
Return to Ask an Essentialist Theologian
Go to Essentialism Question Eleven: What Is the Relationship Between Belief and Practice?