Hope for the IncarceratedНамуна

“We are all more than the worst thing we have ever done.” –Bryan Stevenson

You currently live among daily reminders of terrible things people have done. Maybe even terrible things YOU’VE done. But whatever you have done—or have not done—it is not who you ARE.

So who are you? You are a beloved child of God, for starters. You are one who has been forgiven and who continues to be forgiven for all that you’ve done or left undone.

Maybe you know this already. But here’s one thing that applies to Christians. We can do something especially heinous: we can forgive others without ever forgiving ourselves.

God has forgiven us, but sometimes we still want to hold on to our own unforgiveness, beating ourselves up and soaking in our own despair. But this is not godly! Jesus explicitly tells us in scripture to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” But if we only have pitiful love for ourselves, then we will have pitiful love for our neighbors.

Loving yourself means forgiving yourself for the worst thing you’ve ever done. And the not-so-bad stuff, too. When you can walk in complete and total surrender to God—including God’s forgiveness—then you can truly start to love yourself. And when you do that, you love your neighbor, too.

You are so much more.