i was ashamed. God wasn’t.

I grew up in a typical Christian household. My family, my friends, and almost everyone around me was Christian, so naturally, I grew up with faith as a part of my everyday life.

For a long time, I thought of beliefs as something that gave us boundaries. There were things we were encouraged to do and things we were encouraged to stay away from. When I was younger, I mostly saw those boundaries as rules I was supposed to follow.

But as I grew older, I started to understand my faith for myself.

I began to realise that the values I had grown up with could become more than rules. They could become a guide for the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of life and relationships I wanted to build.

One of those values was intimacy.

I had always imagined sharing that part of myself within a committed relationship. And as I grew older, I realized that this wasn’t simply something I believed because I had been taught to believe it. It was something I genuinely wanted for myself.

However a committed relationship never happened for me. It kind of filled me with a kind of rage, i can not even explain. I felt like i was missing out on a huge part of my early/mid twenties. So, at 26, I crossed a boundary I had set for myself. I experienced a kind of intimacy outside of the commitment I had always envisioned for my first time.

I tried to act as if it wasn’t that deep. Empowering. A woman who makes her own choices and follows her desires. But deep down I carried a lot of shame with me. It wasn’t really about what had happened. It was about what I thought it meant about me.

After a while, I began to wonder whether I was still worthy of the life and love I had once imagined for myself. I felt lost for a little while. And somewhere in that feeling of being lost, my faith became part of the conversation again.

I wondered whether God even truly loves me. I had always believed in His love. But I didn’t feel particularly proud of myself and did not really know how to receive it.

And that experience taught me something that changed the way I saw both myself and my faith.

I recognised that I violated a value that genuinely mattered to me, and I had to learn the difference between accountability and shame.

Accountability allowed me to look at what happened honestly. It allowed me to recognise that my choices matter and that my values matter. Shame, however, told me a different story. It told me that because I had stepped outside of my values, I had somehow become less worthy of love.

And slowly, I realized that those two things could exist separately. I could acknowledge what happened without allowing it to become my identity. I could learn from the experience without believing that my future had changed forever.

And most importantly, I could still turn toward God.

Because I was created by the source of love and grace. And if God is the source of love and grace, then maybe I was never meant to believe that one moment could put me outside of it.

I began to see that my faith was not about being perfect enough to deserve God’s love. It was about knowing where to turn when I needed grace. And in a strange way, this experience brought me closer to the faith I thought I had lost.

It helped me understand my own values more deeply.

I learned that they weren’t simply rules passed down to me. They were values I had chosen for myself because they reflected the kind of love, intimacy and relationships I want to experience.

And I can still choose them and grow closer to God. And perhaps that is what growing closer to God has looked like for me.

Not becoming perfect. But becoming more honest, compassionate and intentional about the life I want to build.

God’s love is never something I could lose simply because I am human. Quite the opposite. I am a love letter written by God.