“Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. ⁵ Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; on You I wait all the day.” –Psalm 25:4-5

When it comes to having faith in God who is invisible, our awareness of His presence is different for each individual.  There is a verse in the Bible that says “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you” (James 4:8). The more I made the effort to interact with God through reading the Bible, prayer, and questioning Him about life, the more sensitive I became of His presence.

I considered myself to be a pretty good person.  But that notion changed dramatically when a major crisis occurred in my life, leading me to commit a sin that was big enough to affect my moral conscience with overwhelming guilt. As painful as this part of my spiritual journey was, it gave an opportunity for God to enable me to know without a doubt that His love for me is unconditional.

 I was raised in a Catholic home. My relationship with God began with the understanding that He was a conditional God who was “up there” in heaven and I was “down here” on earth and was supposed to live life to my best behavior.  As a teenager I was fortunate that my mother had Christian devotional books I had read that were full of stories of how people personally experienced God in their lives, which helped me realize He was a loving God and cared about us intimately.

 As I was growing up I became more and more aware of my desire to know true love and to be accepted for who I was.  When I became older, my attempts at knowing love through having a relationship with a boyfriend had failed. Every attempt to meet or get to know someone I thought was right for me fell through.

Knowing that God was the author of love, I began to question Him about why I was having problems establishing a relationship with a boyfriend.  He led me to the verse in 1 John 4:18 “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.  The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

So, not knowing the difference between God’s love and worldly love at the time, I tried not to be afraid of love.  Well, of course that didn’t work out. Without being able to experience love as I understood it, my search for meaning in life became more and more hopeless and everything led to emptiness.  Being discouraged, my values began to drop and fade, and the world got the best of me.  I gave up on thinking God was interested in my personal life.

I eventually started a relationship with someone I knew was not right for me, hoping for the best.  It didn’t last long.  I became pregnant and we ended our relationship.  Feeling vulnerable and thinking how an unplanned pregnancy would interfere with my idealistic plans for my future, I decided to have an abortion.  Afterwards I quickly realized that I had made a big mistake when I gave up on God.  I immediately sensed that the abortion was wrong and asked God to forgive me.

So life went on, believing I was forgiven, only not being so favorable in God’s eyes. It wasn’t long before this conditional view of God got the best of me.  As I went on in my search for love, I finally met someone I thought was my perfect match.  But after the first date it fell through for no apparent reason.  So I thought that God may have had something to do with this to get my attention.  Right away I thought of my big sin, my abortion, that maybe I really wasn’t forgiven, and He wanted to punish me by depriving me of what I longed for the most.  

At the same time I saw how the pro-life movement was displaying graphic pictures of aborted fetuses during their protests in order to expose the truth that the fetus is a living person, a fact that I was in denial of and needed to come to terms with. As a result of these things, I felt completely forsaken by God.  I mistakenly thought He was convicting me of sin without having mercy on me, leaving me feeling condemned, rejected and terrified.

My awareness of God had become so profound by the moral conviction that weighed on my heart after having my abortion, so I knew that I couldn’t lie to Him about my sin because He knows everything. To admit being wrong is never easy, especially when it involves punishment. Since I did not understand God’s unconditional love at the time, I was fearful of being eternally rejected from God.  I was also going through shock with coming to terms in realizing my accountability before God of being responsible for my abortion. Because I believed God had forsaken me, I subconsciously went into self-denial; it was my only self-defense of escaping His rejection. (I came to understand this in hindsight.)

But this is where the real nightmare began for me.  Because God is a real God, we can’t escape the truth, and He loves us too much to let us.  Denying myself gave me an excuse to escape my responsibility to answer to God, but it opened a door for the devil to use my mind as a playground.  If I was denying my ability to think properly, then that was fair game for him to fill my mind with his manipulative thoughts. If I surrendered having authority over my thoughts, then how could I defend myself from intrusive thoughts?  The devil was able to trick my mind into thinking people knew my thoughts by having them verbalize what I was thinking. This soon developed into being a mental state of paranoia. At first it seemed coincidental, but then it became unrealistically constant. I couldn’t figure out how this was possible or why people would do this.  At that time I didn’t understand the spiritual perspective of what I was experiencing, leading me to think I was going crazy.

The paranoia became emotionally unbearable; I had reached the limit of tolerating this torment. I decided that I had nothing to lose by rekindling my hope and believe with all my heart that God was a God of dignity, who took no pleasure in me being in this self-afflicted condition. My false understanding of Him as being a merciless judge had led me to strip myself of that dignity and human worth through self-denial, and now I was desperate and ready to know the truth about God’s true character.

I eventually became free over time by learning the truth about God and His unconditional love for me, and that condemnation comes from the devil who will stop at nothing to keep us from believing in God’s love. This is when I became born-again and accepted the Lord as my Savior.  I have to admit that it was a long hard battle to shake off the lie of rejection and believe He accepted me just as I am.  It was my ignorance of God and the lies of the devil that caused me to bring this mental self-infliction upon myself.  But God used it for good because it caused me to know Him in a much deeper and realistic way.

I finally found the love I was always looking for, through having a relationship with Jesus Christ, for “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13).