I wrote down:

1. I feel like the dog, struggling, fighting against so many emotions and beliefs. Feeling miserable, full of confusion, frustration, feeling overwhelmed.

2. I want to become the one in the front with the red shirt. I want to live, give everything, with identity, unity, faith and passion. 

I know these feelings of shame for who I am. This conviction of being unworthy to be loved.

I remember feeling miserable and undeserving, trying to live up to the expectations of those around me or even the expectations I had towards myself.

I know this painful feeling of shame, pushing me even deeper into that certitude of not being enough, not being capable, being worthless, unlovable.

I compared myself to those around me.

Fear, shame, pain, indecision, confusion, envy, frustration, feeling overwhelmed, suppressing issues, numbing thoughts, passivity and hopelessness… were all a reality of my life.

I was a Christian; therefore, I had heard about God’s love for me.

But somehow, this reality was out of my reach. After all, I knew how flawed I was. I was well aware of my weaknesses and incapacities. I tried hard to get somewhere, to fight my beliefs, to overcome my fears; to face my feelings of shame and worthlessness.
I tried to be a “good Christian”, yet terrified to let anyone get close enough to me to really know me… and discover how flawed and imperfect I truly am.

Today, almost two decades later, I become always more that person with the red shirt. –  living a life of fullness, giving everything, with identity, unity, faith and passion.

What has changed? What reality has transformed my life?
I could tell you about many things that added up to where I am today helped me get where I am today.

About amazing people who loved me beyond my flaws, about insights I got that touched my heart enough to grasp and apply them, about the mercy of God who, in his infinity, gentleness and patience brought me all the way to this point in my life.
However, last Sunday in church during a time of Worship, I realized that there was a deep truth I would like to share with you, a reality that is so life transforming and beautiful I just have to try to put it into words in this article.
Let’s go:

During this time of worship, we sang a song that went like:

 The phrase „lover of my soul“ touched my heart in a deep way.

This is it.

This is the reality that has transformed my life and still does.

There is a God who loves my soul.

A God that sees beyond my efforts, my achievements, my capacity. He sees beyond this image I try to represent on the outside; He sees the true me.

He sees our most hidden needs, longings, pain and dreams.

He sees our biggest failures, our wrong decisions, our compulsions or addictions – even those we are capable to hide from other people.
And still – He loves us!!

He longs to reach out to us, to find us and love us.
When I was seven years of age, I invited Jesus into my life – it was the day my spirit was saved and I became a child of God.

But it was the reality that he was the “Lover of my soul” that led me into freedom in my soul.

It was Him that created me with my unique DNA.
He put a unique essence within me that makes who I am.

He doesn’t see me by my achievements; he sees me for who I truly am, deep down, when no one is looking.

In the Bible there is a scripture that says:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” ( The Bible, John 3:16 )

It doesn’t say: “He loves the ones who are great achievers, the ones who stay out of trouble and the ones who do everything right; “

NO! It says: He loves the world.
And we all know how messed up this world is.

How messed up you and I can be.

And yet, he loves us!

My relationship with God changed (and still is changing) since I understand more and more that He loves my soul.

The more I enter into this truth, the more does freedom enter my life.

The freedom to be me.

The freedom to let go of the picture of how I need to be – and to become authentic, real and vulnerable to be who God created me to be.

True vulnerability is to be seen, being known and being real. It is coming to term with our weaknesses and embracing them as gifts from God. 

The more I can walk in this reality, the more I can let go of my fears and feelings of shame and inadequacy.

The more I enter into enjoying who God made me to be, the more I feel thrilled to be me: I have moments when I worship God for who he made me to be, simply because I see the blessing I can be in being me.
It comes with the understanding that I can only be me.

Who I am at the core has always leaked out, no matter how much I’ve tried to suppress or change it, believing that it wasn’t enough. Living it out enables me to love, to reach beyond myself. 

We can only do this when we stop to constantly undermine who we are by trying to copy other people and trying to be them

The more I walk in this path, the more I see people around me with those same eyes.
I see their beauty, their unique DNA, their amazing wonderful essence, how God created them to be. I can see beneath their walls or fears or insecurities directly into their beautiful, unique being.

And I love that.

You see, it is truly so:

“Love your neighbor as you love yourself. ”  (The Bible, Matthew 22.39) 

You can’t love others more than you do yourself.
The more you love yourself, the more you can love others.
The more you walk with freedom, passion, in unity and love.

My prayer for you and for me is that we can experience this amazing God who loves our soul. That we can accept that Jesus died on the cross for us so that we can be transferred into his kingdom. That we can learn to live with royal principles and enter this process of transformation into His image.

I believe that I chose a husband who has the very same traits.

I’m pretty sure having this kind of experience with these traits in my dad, made me recognize them in Benny.

The essence of who my dad truly is shaped my life greatly.

Today I can see this unique DNA, his unique essence of who he is shining through his personality which is generally overwhelmed with life.
Shining through the many hurts, the many disappointments and the pain he experienced in his life, shining through the many destructive ways he chose in order to protect himself and “survive” a life he didn’t choose.

Today I can see that. I honor him for who he ought to be. For the amazing and unique person God made him to be.

Lamentably, to this day, he doesn’t realize how amazing and unique a person God created him to be and how much he’s deeply loved by him.

As long as I remember, my father struggled with depression.
As a father, he was a very controlling, angry, negative and selfish person. He always felt that his five children were too heavy a load to bear.
He gave us the feeling (and told us so) that we were too much, too loud, too needy, too expensive and that we were all losers and guilty of anything that didn’t go right in his own life.

I could tell you many situations in which we were confronted with this reality.

Years ago, when I saw my father, I felt nothing more than this deep hurt of not being enough to be loved.
His messages (verbalized or not) shaped the understanding of my identity, life in general and God.

I left home with the deep hole in my soul a father should have filled.
I left with this deep insecurity about my identity, my worth, my value and my importance.
I knew that I didn’t want to be like him. I didn’t want to end in depression and anger, leaving the same hurtful impact on the lives around me. 

But the truth is… by rejecting where I came from, I was rejecting a part of me.

I was rejecting the whole package: The destructive ways he chose to protect himself and his unique DNA.

And well, I don’t blame anyone doing that.

I know the deep pain and the feeling of being fatherless, even if my father is alive, sometimes even present in my own life. I know this longing for a father who would be here to cherish, protect, guide and love you.

I took countless decisions out of my hurts and this deep hole in my soul. I lead myself through turbulent times I certainly could have omitted if I would have had a father who showed me that I was valuable, precious and important to him.

But today, I see that my father, by who he truly was, did transmit something other than those painful realities: He transmitted to me this deep desire to follow God, to do what is right. My moral standards have always been very high. I always wanted to please God and walk in His ways.

And God honored this heart and took me on this journey which I am still on today.

A part of this journey was this concept of honoring father and mother. Because I wanted to do what was right, I couldn’t ignore the scripture in the bible that tells in Exodus 20:12 to

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you”.

But I wasn’t ready to cover up how I felt, just for the sake of “honor”.

My father – as correct as he is and as much as he wants to do what is right – was defenseless when, a few years ago, his own father, who had abandoned him and his mother while he was just a little boy, called him daily (and sometimes even several times a day) from his retirement home in France, for nothing more than to insult him. My grandfather was a war veteran. He had experienced his own trauma – and probably because of that – lost his memory as he got older. That’s why he didn’t even remember the call he had just made and he used to call shortly after again. This went on for several months and even years.

As I got to know about those phone calls, I told my father that I would never accept anyone doing this to me. That this was verbal abuse and there was no way I would tolerate this in my life. I told him that, after a few calls like this, I would block the person out, even if it was my own father.
He didn’t understand what I was talking about. For him, this was honoring his father.

I believe that honoring my father is very different.

As God lead me through that journey, I had to face the reality of my Dad’s attitudes in my life. The reality of what he taught me about myself, life and God (verbal and non-verbal) and how this affected my whole being.
It came in layers. First the big things. The way I felt rejected. The way I felt he cared only for himself. Then, the things I realized we were missing, like family vacations. We didn’t take family vacations  even once throughout my whole childhood.

During that process, I knew the feeling of hatred. Of rejecting my dad – and every other person that resembled him. However, ironically, I tried to be loved by a guy who would have never been the person I would have chosen, concerning his interests and values in life. He was not a bad guy – but he just wasn’t the right person for me. Like my father, he wasn’t able to handle me. I was too emotional, too needy, simply too much for him.  Today I know that I simply longed to prove to myself that I could be loved by someone like my father.

Today, I am able to face the reality of where I come from.
And instead of pain, there is gratefulness.
Instead of ashes, there is beauty.

Simply because I have come to realize that today, I am not the fruit of what he (and others) did to me. Not even the fruit of my own wrong decisions, mistakes, failures and incapacities.
My life is a display of the faithfulness of God. Of His love, His grace, His capacity and His compassion.

He took me from my painful reality onto this journey. He fathered me, He guided me, He gave me value, importance, and worth. He showed me His love in countless ways. He healed and restored my soul.

Today, there is freedom in my relationship with my father.

Today, I have truly forgiven him. Forgiveness was a journey in itself and not done by a one-time decision. But more on that another time.

Today, I am well capable to set my limits and to stand up for my integrity, as I explained in that article.

I am free because my dad’s attitudes and hurtful behavior are not determining my identity, worth and value anymore. I am free to see that he tried hard to cope with life the way he knew… always feeling like a “nobody”, a “looser” and “forgotten” by God and men.  

And I recognize those attributes of him that I see in myself, too. And I love them.

I see those positive traits in Benny, and I celebrate them.

I discover those attributes in my children, and I affirm them. 

I know that my father has great respect for me and my family.
I know he thinks that I am doing a wonderful job, and he even told me so.

Lately, I told him:

“You know, I am so grateful that I am your descendant. We both know that there were many things in our relationship father-daughter that were difficult and painful.

However, today, I see those precious attributes of yours. I see this unique person God has made you to be. I believe I saw them in Benny because you displayed them in my life, and I cherish them.

By the grace of God, who you truly are speaks louder in my life then all what went wrong.”

I was so terribly sorry! I was confronted with feelings of shame, guilt, anger, powerlessness – but all I could do right in that situation was to tell her how sorry I am and how much I regretted the way things went.

A couple of years ago, I would have felt overwhelmed with guilt and fallen apart by my failure.
I would have felt bad for days, walking around with that constant feeling of failure and sadness. I would have had a self talk that went something like this:
“I can’t believe how stupid I am! How could I not have realized that I should do things differently before? Those things always happen to me! I will never go far in my life, I always mess up situations! I am one great failure!“

Today?
Right after that phone call, still in front of my computer, I looked at the title of my article, smiling through some tears.

“How I learned to be gracious toward myself and others”.

Well. Actually exactly through situations like this.

Through moments when I am confronted with situations I messed up. Situations, where I have to recognize that I didn’t live up to what would have been right/wise or loving to do. Situations where others are hurt because of my immaturity, my ignorance or my perception.
The closer the relationship, the harder it is to face such situations.

There are two tendencies of how to react here:

• One can, as I would have done in the past, feel like a complete failure. . Be overwhelmed with guilt and shame, and blame oneself. 
• The other way would be to never recognize our responsibility. To put the blame on any other person rather than to admit that we wronged someone, failed in our attempt to be that friend/parent/spouse/ boss/ or employee we want to be.

Today my reaction is very different.
Right there on the phone, I made sure to listen what my friend had to tell me. I told her how sorry I was that my ways of doing things did make her feel that way.
After I hung up, I did feel really bad and terribly sorry for the way I hurt her.

However, I refused to go on that guilt trip. I refused to put the blame on anyone else. Right then, I couldn’t do more to fix the situation.
But I knew by experience that this doesn’t change anything concerning my value and worth.

This, because I deeply know that I am not who I am today because of my perfection or my own righteousness.

It is not my capacity, my performance and my awesomeness that brought me here.

It is rather the other way round. Because I experienced God’s grace, His mercy and His compassion in my life, I am at a place today where I am able to live a fulfilled life despite the situations where I fail to be who – in this situation that friend – I want to be.

Today, such situations make me humble and deeply grateful.

They make my heart moved by the grace and compassion God has for me – and each and every person in this world.
Instead of blaming myself or others, I bless each and every person involved in such situations.
I thank God for his grace, His love, His goodness and His capacity to touch our lives, turn them around and bring them into harmony with Him.
God is not afraid of our failures and of the situations we mess up. He’s not scared of our humanity.
And I love that about Him. 

I’m so glad that I have come a long way to being merciful towards me and others.

Of course, it still is an ongoing process and it sometimes involves tough decisions to stand above my feelings and take the right action. Still, God has been so gracious to bring significant change into my life, concerning that matter.

Instead of becoming discouraged and depressed, I am today able to grow from such experiences.

Instead of becoming bitter, I become more grateful, gracious and softhearted toward myself and others.

Instead of blaming myself or putting the blame on others, I take responsibility – and no matter the outcome of that situation, I will use it to grow, to learn, to mature.