For decades, I searched in all the wrong places for proof that I mattered.
Below, I describe three places where I most deeply tied my worth to performance and approval, along with the mindsets that kept me trapped there—struggles you may recognize in yourself. While other areas also shaped my journey, these three proved the most difficult to undo.
IN THE CHURCH
Faulty Mindset: My worth and salvation must be earned.
Who would have thought that the root of my struggle—my need to prove myself worthy of salvation—would be tied to the ordinance of baptism?
I experienced this need to prove myself in baptism while a member of the Church of Christ and the International Church of Christ (ICOC). For them, baptism = salvation, and before you get in the water, you must complete a prescribed process, secure a leader’s approval of your repentance, and affirm that salvation occurs only after emerging from the water.
For decades, this felt like taking salvation seriously. Eventually, I saw it was blocking my understanding of God’s grace.
I was baptized three times in the ICOC because each time I feared I had missed a required step. I never felt perfectly saved. Despite my private anguish, I taught these doctrines anyway—preaching baptism as the point of salvation and requiring people to prove their repentance to church leaders. I had been trained to read Scripture as a formula rather than as the story of grace revealed in Jesus Christ.
This belief system kept me in an exclusive, isolating system. We could not marry outside it, attend other denominations, or recognize other Christians as saved. All on the technicality of the precise way to be baptized!!
Where God Led Me: I left the ICOC and wrote a book about my experience and what I learned after leaving. Dying to Belong (available on Amazon under my name, Diane Marie Mitchell) became a source of connection and healing for others who had lived under the same burdens.
In Addition, through renewed study of Scripture—especially God’s grace and salvation—I joined a church with a different theology. Though we still celebrate baptism by immersion, it is understood as a public declaration of faith (a faith that already saves) and identification with Christ, not a requirement to earn salvation.
PRODUCTIVITY
Faulty Mindset: I’m worth something when I’m useful.
For most of my life, I stayed relentlessly busy. In the ICOC, faith was measured by attendance and involvement, quietly attaching salvation to constant activity. Missing a church-sanctioned event raised questions about your spiritual standing.
It wasn’t until I left nearly four years ago that I could name what my busyness really was: a socially approved way of avoiding deeper truths. Productivity gave me purpose and a sense of control. But it also drowned out the silence—the place where grief, loss, and disappointment waited to be acknowledged.
When the structures that fueled my busyness finally collapsed, I was forced to face a truth I had long been outrunning: for more than forty years, the version of Christianity I had followed was the wrong kind of Christianity.
What was wrong? I was performing faith instead of living it with honesty and joy. Christianity isn’t for perfectionists—Jesus calls us to freedom, not rules.
Where God Led Me: I don’t place my worth on how productive I am or what I produce. My life is simple now. I am not out trying to change the world. I would rather be a silent servant who touches lives in quiet spaces.
I make space for solitude. I allow myself to grieve and to name sorrow without shame. I no longer pretend that faith makes me immune to depression or regret. I am a real person, loving a very real God.
I now have autonomy over how I spend my time and where I worship. Lifegate Denver has been a breath of fresh air, offering flexibility in how and when I serve. My relationship with God is no longer measured by attendance, yet I genuinely choose to be present.
STATUS & ROLES
Faulty Mindset: I’m worth something because of the roles I have.
Reaching my sixties has been revealing. As we age, we lose roles we once held and take on ones we never expected.
I have always been a late bloomer. I became a mother at forty when my daughter, Lian, was placed in my arms in Nanchang, China. I am divorced. I do not yet have grandchildren. I have lost the role of wife and now carry the label of “older single woman.”
My work life has shifted as well. I currently work part-time—24 hours a week—as a remote report developer for a Southern California bank. When I retire, I won’t define myself by a career.
Where God Led Me: I have let go of the belief that my worth is tied to titles or milestones. I now believe that being a faithful friend, a present mother, a hardworking older woman in a millennial workplace, and a joyful lover of life and Jesus is enough.
God does not assign value based on our performance, productivity, or proximity to religion. For years, I let achievement and approval define my worth. Now I know the truth: my value was never something to earn—it was given by the finished work of Jesus, and it remains.
If you recognize yourself in this story, pause and ask where you may still be striving for worth—and consider what it would look like to rest instead in the grace already offered to you.
