The Empty Pursuit of Forgiving Yourself
After my conversion, my pillow soaked up many tears—tears of joy at first, but then tears of sorrow.
Before I was saved, I was blinded by my own self-righteousness that told me I was fully in the right in the ways I wounded others. Though I never physically laid a hand on anyone, I knew how to leave a verbal bruise. I justified my words by convincing myself they were for my own protection. I hurt my parents, my boyfriend, and my friends under the self-proclaimed cause of “self-care.” Every morning I seemed to wake with a further self-awareness of what a horrible person I was.
I wanted to find healing for my guilt. I knew many of the Bible verses that talked about forgiveness, but that didn’t feel like enough. No matter how many people told me that was a thing of past and I was forgiven, this guilt seemed to lay heavier on me each day.
I came to the conclusion that I was simply being too hard and needed to forgive myself. But I wasn’t sure how to go about doing that.
I poured my heart out to an older friend, and she hit me with a hard truth I did not expect: You don’t need to forgive yourself.
Read the rest of this article on the True Woman Blog.
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We don’t like to think of our cute, tiny children as being sinful. As moms, we may feel uncomfortable even telling our children they’re sinners. Why do we want our children to feel guilty? But what if the uncomfortable, bad news is necessary before our kids (or anyone) can truly understand the good news of the gospel at all?