Worth vs. Value

Worth vs. Value.  In less than one week, I will board another plane to Douala, Cameroon, for teaching theology to pastors. Praise the Lord! By the time I land, after a long 24-hour journey, I will be happy to collapse into bed. Any bed will do. It surely won’t matter about the thread-count of the sheets at that point! Because the students are eager to learn, I am eager to teach, muscling through jetlag. But I am never eager to play the accountant. Bleh. The receipts, the exchange rates, the codes, and the math swim before my eyes. Yet mere money accounts for just one third of the expense. Time and sanity are also full-fledged economies that will not be ignored. But how does one rightly measure time and sanity?

I have tried to evaluate my time on mission trips with a homemade metric, my total travel hours compared to my total teaching hours ratio. When this trip is all buttoned-up, I will have travelled/prepared to travel 48 hours and taught/prepared to teach 48 hours, a 1:1 ratio. That’s a fairly good number as I remember some trips with a grueling 2:1 ratio, travel-to-teaching. (One trip was 3:1, but that will trigger a flashback.) But my sanity would vote for a solid 1:2 ratio, even a dreamy 1:4 ratio, if such were even possible as a part-time missionary. But is this how mission decisions are made, by comparing costs on a spreadsheet? No!

My point is this: worth vs. value. Is it worthwhile to travel 70 hours to teach 21 hours, or 200 minutes to teach 20 minutes? Maybe, but not necessarily. Granted, there is wisdom in calling off a trip when a trip is skewed heavily toward traveling away from teaching. But worth isn’t as operative as much as value is in missions. Worth may determine which ticket I buy, but value drives missions itself.

Worth fluctuates, but value is fixed. Worth depends externally upon supply and demand in today’s marketplace. Others ascribe worth to an object or cause based on like-comparisons. Worth sets a price, a cost of replacement if lost. His time is worth $24/hour. This clock should cost $159. That baseball card cashes out at 8¢ each. However, value determines its significance and importance internally, derived from the source. Like the Creator does for his creation, so an innovator does for his or her intellectual or artistic property, the maker sets the value. Value is prescribed and intrinsic. Thus, the value of missions isn’t measured like the worthwhileness of a cause is calculated, based on cost-benefit analysis or a homemade ratio of time. Value is set by God. What is important to him becomes vital for us.

Accordingly, it doesn’t matter how the world calculates a person’s worth, all persons have inherent value imbued to them by God no matter their level of productibility. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). This forms a necessary tension: humans will remain forever unworthy of God’s redemption but were created as valuable enough to God to redeem. He fixed value on his people, his word, and his name. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness! (Psa.115:1).