Nothing to Prove

How standing in your belovedness frees you to create, love,and be who you are.

I’ll share the full story later, but this is the mantra that changed my life:

When I am standing in my belovedness, I have
nothing to gain,
nothing to lose,
nothing to fear,
nothing to prove.

For someone who spent most of his life trying to prove he belonged and terrified of being abandoned, this mantra was oxygen. A truth I needed to sink into the marrow of my bones.

But as that liberation this idea of being beloved and not needing to prove my worth took root, new fears sprouted up. They’re the same fears that often surface when I teach about belovedness during my retreats or in my office during spiritual direction.

If I really have nothing to prove does that mean I don’t have to do anything anymore? Is this just passivity? Laziness? What about discipline, structure, and the spiritual practices that have shaped lives for thousands of years? What about showing up, growing, failing, and trying again? Where is the spiritual formation in this?

In a very real sense, there actually is nothing left to do. Love is not a prize to be chased, nor a mountain to be climbed. Standing in belovedness does, in fact, mean the work is already finished, the belonging already given, the thread already woven through our being. From the first breath to the last, it has been ours. Nothing to earn. Nothing to prove. Only to awaken to what has always been stitched into the fabric of who we are.

And yet, it doesn’t mean we sit back and do nothing. It’s quite the opposite. Knowing we are already beloved actually frees us to create, to work, to live, and do from a wildly beautiful, healthy, and abundant place.

Spiritual practices, creative disciplines, daily routines—they don’t earn us belovedness. They simply shape us so we can live awake inside it. They form us into the person we already are.

Think about it: when I don’t believe I’m worthy until I reach a certain net worth, find a partner, or achieve some milestone, all the work I do, whether in my passions or not, is aimed at that end. It robs the work itself of its dignity. But when I live from the truth that I am beloved, when I work, dream, and create from that place, everything changes. I work and live as I’ve been designed to be.

What if God has already made you a writer, an artist, a parent, a partner, a friend, an entrepreneur? What if the truth of who you are is already there, waiting only for practice to reveal it?

We do things because we are loved, not in order to earn love. This is the most holistic way we can live. There’s a world of difference between working to become something and working because you already are something. One grinds us down; the other breathes life into us.

Most of us get trapped in the “if/then” story. If I write, then I’ll be a writer. If I publish, if I gain followers, then I’ll finally be legit.

But no. I write because I am a writer. I sit down, stumble through sentences, fail often, press “publish” not to prove that I am something, but because it’s already true.

The same goes for prayer, meditation, silence. I don’t pray to get God’s love. I pray because I am loved. I meditate not to find God somewhere out there, but to rest in the God who has always been here.

When we live from this place, practice stops being an obligation and becomes an invitation. We aren’t striving to become something we’re not. We’re learning to rest more fully in what’s already true.

And strangely, that’s when the real growth happens. Growth beyond what we could have forced or manufactured. Growth that feels like a gift rather than a reward.

So here’s the invitation: show up to one of your practices today as if who you long to be is already true. Because it is. Show up to your practice, spiritual, relational, or creative. Not with the story that you’re trying to become something, but because you already are that thing.

Imagine yourself as the person you dream of being, feel what it feels like to stand in that identity, and then bring that energy with you to your guitar, your computer, or your cubicle.

And then move. Write a messy sentence. Send the awkward text. Go for the run. Sit for five minutes in silence. Not to prove yourself, not to earn anything, but because it’s already true of you.

That’s the shift that will change your life.