I had been a Christian for years, but I hated myself. That shouldn’t be possible, but I did. I was preaching grace, but showing myself none. It struck me one night as I sat in my apartment. I really dfo hate myself, I thought. I realized how wrong that was, and that it needed to change.

It’s not an easy thing to change.

It took a lot of prayer to get there. In particular, one especially powerful prayer and the agency of God in addressing the lies I’d come to believe about myself. Honestly, it took supernatural healing. There was a moment that God did something, and ever since, I have not been able to honestly say that I hate myself. He did something in me.

What remains to be overcome is my hatred of imperfection. That still remains. I hate my own flaws, in that drains me of grace when I encounter other people’s flaws. When people make mistakes, I’m extremely intolerant. I think it’s because I fought so hard not to make mistakes in my life. I see other people not fighting as hard — that is, being happier and freer — I react very strongly against that.

I’m especially intolerant of Christians making mistakes. You’re making us look bad, I think. To be honest, I’ve had some horrible thoughts about Christians who I think have low intelligence. I can’t bear to think how that makes us look in the eyes of a culture that already thinks of us as stupid and misled.

I think I was taught that, essentially, mistakes are sins. I can’t remember anyone ever actually saying that, but I think it’s something a lot of influential people in my life implied very heavily, at least by their actions. Somehow, I came to believe that all mistakes are the result of negligence or some other personal deficiency. If you forget what somebody says, it’s because you weren’t paying close enough attention. If you were shown how to do something right but it didn’t do it, you don’t care enough to do it right.

The problem is, one way or another, I learned these mistaken ideas so thoroughly that they still sound right to me. They still seem kind of reasonable. I’m having to fight hard to remember that there is such a thing as a mistake. I have to check myself, tell myself the truth over and over until it sounds true to me.

In my recent fight against all this, I read a book called The Search for Significance. In it, the author addresses several common lies that people believe, which leads them toward depression. One of those lies is that if you are imperfect, you are unworthy of love.

When I read that, I realized how deeply I believed it.

Despite being a Christian pastor for several years, despite believing wholeheartedly in the love and grace of God, something deep inside me still believed that because I was not flawless in my every word and deed, I was not worthy to be loved by anyone. I also realized that I believed this very deeply for myself, but not for others. Mind you, I knew intellectually that God’s love and grace extend to everyone including me. I accepted that. I just didn’t feel it. That’s what I mean when I say that I believed myself unworthy of love. I didn’t feel worthy of love. Something deep in my being would not allow what I believed in my mind to reach my heart. Not where it concerned myself.

So when I began recently rereading the Psalms, there was one that stood out to me. In Psalm 62, David says that his soul finds rest in God. Now, “soul” is one of those words that deserves looking up. We may have grown up with any number of ideas about what the soul really is, but what David means when he says it is the deepest inner self, that place in us that drives our choices and everything else that makes us us.

What David is saying is, his self finds rest in God. And when I read that, I realized how badly I wanted it. That is what I am doing now. Not just to believe, but to believe wholeheartedly and with all of my being, to be so secure in my belief that it dismantles my deepest insecurities.

I believe in God. I put my trust in Jesus. I know for a fact that I am saved. I just need my heart to know that in a new way. And I know that when I do, it will change everything.