{Guest Post by Ana Bright from These Bright Ideas}
You are not good enough. You never will be.
And that’s okay.
I’ve spent most of my life not feeling good enough. Two of the three memories of my biological father are filled with fights and anger. In the other memory, he picked my little brother and me up at our daycare (I was no older than 4) and we rode in a taxi with him. I found out years later that it wasn’t a taxi and he wasn’t supposed to be picking us up. He kept my brother and I for a week and he refused to tell my mom where we were. When he finally brought us back home, he made sure to tell my mom, “Just so you know, I can get them whenever I want.”
I haven’t seen or heard from him since then nor do I care to. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t spent years wondering why I wasn’t good enough for him to stick around and why he didn’t love me. I guess you could say I have daddy issues. And those issues have been transferred to most relationships in my life. Most of all my relationship with God.
Always in fear of being abandoned, I took the mentality of ‘leave before you’re left.’ It’s a mentality that seemed to protect me most of the time. Looking back now, one that probably played in my divorce.
After a 6-month span of craziness and bad choices, I finally started to forgive myself. And about a year after the ink dried on the divorce papers, I came to Christ and was baptized. That was 6 years ago. I’ve been remarried now for four but I still struggle with not feeling good enough. It feels like I have to earn love and acceptance, even from people who love me the most. And especially from God. He knows everything I’ve done and thought about doing in my life. Some things I’ve never told a soul. How could He possibly love me?
But He does.
I don’t have to get to a place where I’m lovable. I don’t have to be the perfect Christian. That is an oxymoron after all. Romans 5:8 says it so perfectly, “but God demonstrates His own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
There are no exceptions to this.
I am loved. Exactly where I am. Exactly as I am. And so are you.
this blog is me … I feel the same way about my sperm donor bio dad whatever u call him i have anger towards him. he signed off rights to me at age 5 and THANK GOD my stepfather adopted me! and raised me
I have anger about having two birth certificates one saysVOID and the pther says sonya peters…
The real dad which abused my mother contacted me ten years ago and blames my mother … I have mixed feelings about this and his “excuse”
thank you ana for sharing you spoke to my heart