💎 Designed to Be a “10” 💎

Years ago, after I stopped teaching, I realized how much I missed working with students. So I created an interactive talk called “Designed to Be a 10” and started taking it into classrooms.

I spent a lot of time with junior high students—and discovered how much I loved working with that age group. 😊

The talk was about discovering your purpose. Before we got to that, though, I wanted to talk about value.

💵 I’d hold up two $10 bills. One was fresh and crisp. The other was as worn and crumpled as I could find. If I found one that was torn or written on, I considered that a bonus. 😉

I’d make sure they noticed the contrast: one looked practically perfect; the other looked like it had been through a lot.

“Which one is worth more?”

The students would give me this look like,

🤔 This seems obvious…is there a trick?

So I’d ask, “If you walked across the street to G&W, which one would buy you more?”

Immediately they knew the answer, “Neither. They’re both worth $10.”

E X A C T L Y.

And I’d tell them: maybe one bill is fresh off the printing press—clean, crisp, without a single crease. Maybe you find the other one wadded up in a dumpster—dirty, marked up, even torn.

They’ve been through very different things. But they’re still worth exactly the same.

Sometimes our lives can feel like that second bill. Things have happened to us. We’ve been treated like we didn’t matter. We’ve made choices we wish we could undo.

And here’s what I want to tell you now, in words I didn’t use in those classrooms:

As an image bearer of God, you have inherent worth—a value that isn’t diminished by what you’ve done, what’s happened to you, or what others have done to you.

Those things matter. They can leave real wounds and real consequences. But they don’t diminish your worth.

👉 Your value is still a 10.

And so is the value of the person across from you—the one you love easily, the one you struggle to understand, even the one you strongly disagree with.

I think we all need that reminder sometimes. At least I know I do: to see ourselves and each other as people whose worth as human beings is always a 10, never less.

I loved watching that idea begin to sink in with the students. You could feel the room change a little as they realized,

💡 “Wait. I really am a 10.”

And then I’d hold up those two bills again and ask them another question. But I’ll save that one for the next post. 😊