As a child who grew up in the church, I remember being terrified of him because I thought if I did anything wrong, I was doomed and destined to hell. I thought that I had to be perfect and do everything right or God wouldn’t love me. These types of thoughts followed me all the way from my childhood to early adulthood and during this time I struggled with being angry at God and not fully trusting him because I felt that if God truly loved me, he wouldn’t make it so hard for me to go to heaven. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that the image of God that had been painted for me as a child was not correct and in fact extremely far from the truth. It was during this time that I begin to read my Bible and understand that God loved me in my imperfection and that he did not expect me to be perfect. The only thing that God wanted from me was to have a relationship with me and for me to get to know him that was it. It finally dawned on me that my efforts to win God’s approval would never be successful because that is not what he intended for me to do. In all honesty there is nothing that I can or could ever do to gain God’s approval or his love but the good thing about this is that I don’t have to gain God’s approval or his love. God loves me and there is nothing that I could ever do that would make him take his love away from me because God’s love for me is unconditional.
