As I was sorting through a bunch of old files the other day, I came across a paper I had written for a college philosophy class. The paper itself wasn’t all that good or interesting, but the title caught my eye. The title of that paper was “The Significance of the Ring of Gyges”. When I read the title I couldn’t for the life of me remember just what the Ring of Gyges was, so I had to read my old paper! Then it came back to me.

In one of the sections of Plato’s Republic, the great teacher Socrates tells the story of the Ring of Gyges. According to that old myth, the ring was a magic ring that made the person wearing it invisible. Socrates asks his students this question: “How would an honest man behave if he were to wear that ring?”  When his students gave no answer, Socrates said that both the honest man and the dishonest man may act in the same way. He concluded by saying, “If a person truly understood his own self-interest, he would never take advantage of his invisibility to do anything wrong. Why? Because there would be nothing he could gain that would be worth the loss of his integrity, his right to think of himself as a good person.”

If you were to make a long list of all of your blessings, I bet there is one blessing that you would not have thought to include in your list of graces – the right to think of yourself as a good person.  Although you may not have thought of this as a blessing, I can assure you as a person who spends a great deal of time with troubled people, that this is indeed a real gift that needs to be at the top of everyone’s list of blessings. There are so many people who cannot find any goodness in themselves and are therefore filled with despair and hopelessness. There are many people who cannot bring themselves to the point where they can begin to forgive themselves for past sins or mistakes and they find it ever more difficult to cope with life.

Jesus came to call us to the truth that we are all made in God’s image and are God’s own beloved children. So, if you are feeling bad about yourself, remember that God has created you as a good person though still a work in progress. You are not perfect but you are God’s own. You are good. God has created you that way and invites you to choose to live your life out of that goodness. If you fail, make mistakes or in some way betray that goodness, remember, we all have in Jesus a good and loving savior who can restore us to sanity and integrity.