Have you ever felt that you aren’t good enough? That you can’t be good enough?

Have you ever lain awake at night, going over and over your faults and crying for God to fix you? To heal the brokenness inside of you? To make you finally good enough? Finally worthy? 

I have. 

There are two ditches a person can fall into here. Either hating themself or thinking they’re perfect. Or at least better than those around them.

It’s even possible to do both at very nearly the same moment. Wavering between the two. 

But I want to focus on the former, because it’s something I’ve both experienced and something I’ve watched others experience. 

It’s a deep ache that most people keep hidden away. 

Maybe you’ve fallen into the habit of praying for God to fix you. To pull you together and make you into something beautiful. 

To take away your faults already and replace them with something He can use. Something that isn’t worthless. That doesn’t constantly mess up. That can see others the way He sees them. 

Someone who doesn’t judge. Who doesn’t get angry. Who doesn’t envy others. 

Maybe you pray that God will uproot the pride in your heart. The thoughts you wished would go away. 

And maybe you wonder why He doesn’t. Why you keep sinning over and over when the Bible says that He will give you whatever you pray for if it is His will. Doesn’t He want you to be perfect?

Doesn’t he want you to get better?

How could He leave you in this state—a state where you can’t seem to stop yourself from breaking more at every turn?

Does He even want you to heal?

What a dangerous question. But maybe it’s one you’ve asked. 

Or maybe you’ve let the guilt stew in your mind, encouraging it. Believing that you deserve it. That you’re supposed to feel intense guilt and shame for your actions. 

And maybe you do deserve it. Maybe we all do. But it isn’t what God wants for us. He’s given you another life. He’s adopted you into His family. He’s given you a place at His table. And He wants you to enjoy it. To feel His love wash over you and sweep away that guilt you’ve been cultivating. 

He wants you to breathe freely and fully, soaking in His forgiveness. 

And maybe you know this already. 

But even if you know that you shouldn’t feel all the guilt, it still doesn’t seem to go away. Why? 

Because you don’t want it to. 

There. I said it. 

And maybe, deep down, you know it’s true. Maybe you’ve known for some time. 

When I was trapped in guilt, I went through waves. Some days I told myself that I deserved it. That I was supposed to feel that guilt, because how else could I understand Christ’s sacrifice? How could I appreciate it if I didn’t feel the weight of my sin? I told myself that it would be wrong to reject the guilt, because then wasn’t I just shutting off the appreciation for what I had been given?

Other days, I shut it off. I didn’t uproot it, I just numbed myself to it. To everything. I learned to switch off all my feelings. Or at least, most of them. 

An emptiness always remained. Always lingered, and I could feel some of the weight still on my shoulders, just in a quieter way. 

But the numbing never lasted long. Sometimes I could only hold it for a few moments. And then it would slip away, leaving me perhaps more broken than before. 

But other times I knew the truth. Or at least, part of it. I would realise that if God could forgive me of all my sins, shouldn’t I? If I was supposed to follow His example in everything, wouldn’t He want me to follow that example, too? Wouldn’t He want me to rest in the forgiveness and love He provides? Otherwise, wasn’t I squandering the great gift He had given me? A gift He had paid for with His life?

It was those times that I was the closest to healing, but something always held me back. Some deep whisper in my heart telling me that I needed the guilt. Urging me to hold on tight. 

And that voice won out for a long time. 

Even at my best, I still clung to the guilt I had fostered for so long. 

Why? 

Because I wanted it. Because it made me feel better, in a twisted, backwards way. Because I truly believed that it helped me. I looked at my life, and the main sin I noticed was my pride. So I tried to combat it with what I thought humility was. 

I told myself that the guilt was really humility. That it was seeing myself how I was. That it was the way to fight my pride. I told myself that if my pride was making me see myself as better than others, the only way to combat it must be to constantly see myself as worse than others. 

That the only way to fix myself was to break myself. 

And yet, somehow, I managed to hide from myself the simple fact that I wanted that guilt. I hid it for years.  

If you struggle with guilt, it may not have the same origins as mine had, but there is a root cause somewhere. Something inside of you believes that you need the pain. That you aren’t good enough. That it’s somehow wrong to feel God’s love. Or that you shouldn’t think of yourself in any positive light. 

Maybe you feel that you need to atone for something. But you might shy away from that word, because you know that God already atoned for all of us. 

Our minds work in strange ways, and when we try to fix something on our own, we usually only make it worse.

But there are a couple ways to fight this off, if you’re willing to try. 

First, acknowledge the truth. Turn to God, and remember that He wants you to be happy.

In order to appreciate His love, you have to feel it. And you won’t feel it if you’re steeping your senses in guilt. 

If all you see is your guilt, who are you looking at? Yourself. You can’t see God if all you’ll look at is yourself. 

And maybe you’re thinking something like “But I already am looking to God. I’m asking Him to fix me. Relying on Him to save me.” 

But are you really? 

When I asked God to fix me, I don’t think I ever seriously believed that He would. It was a hollow prayer. One I designed to make myself believe I was relying on Him. To, ironically, build up my pride—the very thing I thought my guilt was fixing. 

But all my guilt did was feed my pride. All it did was secretly, way down deep, make me think to myself “look at me, I’m growing. I know I’m terrible, but the people around me can’t seem to see their sins. I can see more clearly than they can. I know how bad I am.” It gave me a deep-seated sense of self-righteousness, in the strangest, most twisted way. 

It was an endless cycle: my guilt fed my pride—my self-righteousness. I saw my self-righteousness, feeding my guilt. Which fed my pride. 

I remember lying awake—trying to stay awake—so that I could pray. Trying to keep my guilt bad enough that I could lie awake for hours, praying for God to fix me. Because it made me feel better about myself. I wasn’t turning to Him in humility, but to feed my pride. And I never knew it. 

I would wonder why I couldn’t conjure up enough emotion when I prayed. And the answer was that it was all fake. It was all a trick my heart had set up to fool my mind. 

But how can you combat this?

The first thing that helped me, when I was in my best senses, was a memory. 

I remember my birthday party one year when I was very young. I had helium balloons, and we celebrated at the park. At the end of the party, I remember standing on the play structure and letting go of my balloon. Just watching it rise up into the great, big sky until it disappeared. 

Looking back on it, I wondered if I could let my burdens go like that little balloon. If I could let my guilt go like that. 

But, of course, I still secretly wanted the guilt. So I held on tight. 

I eventually took on a habit of praying between reading chapters of the Bible. Every morning and evening, I read my Bible and prayed. 

But who did I pray for? Myself.

I continued to pray for my healing, for my guilt to leave, for me, for me, for me. 

Now, a few years ago, I had a teacher who told us that she had taken on the habit of praying for the boy she liked when she was younger, who she later married, whenever she thought of him. She encouraged us to do the same, saying that it had been immensely helpful in her marriage. She had prayed for God to strengthen his faith, keep him safe, and that sort of thing. 

So, eventually, I took on the same habit. 

This may seem unrelated, but it was the first thing that really helped me get rid of my guilt.

Soon, I expanded that habit to my best friend. 

I kept including more and more people in my prayers between Bible reading, until there was no more room for me. Until I was praying for all of their happiness and well-being. Until I began thinking more about their needs in my prayers than my own.  

Because, as C. S. Lewis wrote, humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. And that is the key to destroying guilt. 

When I filled my prayers with others, taking on their burdens and their pains, and bringing them to the Lord—rejoicing with them and mourning with them—I became freer than I had been in years. Their suffering gave me perspective, and it drew my thoughts away from myself. 

By filling my time with those around me, praying for them instead of myself, the guilt I had carried for years finally began to fade. 

When I started to forget it, my vision began to clear, and finally I was able to see where it had come from and what it had been all along.

If you want to be free of your own guilt and shame, this is what I recommend: Pray for those around you, rather than yourself. 

You might be thinking that this can’t fix the problem, because what about the rest of the time? What about all those moments throughout the day when you know deep down that you aren’t good enough. Or even not so deep down. What about the weight that drags you down day and night?

And here’s the funny thing: those difficult moments aren’t as big as they seem. 

The real moments of change, the moments where you make the decision, aren’t centered primarily around yourself. They’re centered around God. Because He is the source of healing, and comfort, and love, and humility. He is the source of every good thing, and how you act and think when you go to Him is what shapes your life. 

If you come to Him in true humility, that humility will spread. If you get to the point where you genuinely think more of others than yourself around God, you will begin to feel the healing.

And, of course, the problems don’t usually disappear overnight, but out of every struggle I have faced, this is the one I have seen the most growth in. 

I still struggle with my pride. 

But my guilt is nearly gone.

God has swept it away, replacing my hatred of myself with a love for others, and with a still greater love for Him.