As a child in church, I spent much of my early life hearing, reading, and singing about God’s love for me. But as I look back on my walk with the Lord thus far, there is one question that I seem to have never stopped asking: “Does God really love me?”
I was so young when I first accepted Christ into my heart that I cannot even confidently recall when I did so. But as I grew older, the truth of the gospel became increasingly real and life-giving to me. One moment when I felt a movement of knowledge from my head to my heart was as a teenager at a church summer camp. It was quite ordinary: fellowship with his church, mentorship from older believers, worship, and his Word. Over those five days, God used it all to meet this thirteen-year-old exactly where she was. My heart was moved, quite possibly for the first time, by the beauty of Jesus’ sacrifice for me and the new life that I could find simply by believing in and following him.
But in my teens, and especially as I moved from high school to college, I began to feel weighed down by my relationship with God. I knew that being a Christian meant obeying God, and I found myself starting to feel annoyed by his rules.
One such rule was to not be unequally yoked—a big deal for a young adult, since this meant that I couldn’t date anyone who was not a believer. It was around this time in early college that God’s rules started to feel like a burden, and God was starting to feel unreasonable. His rules, I thought at the time, were keeping me from having fun, from being happy and free.
I distinctly remember feeling irritated as I read through Psalm 119 as a freshman in college. “Oh, how I love your law!” the psalmist writes. “I meditate on it all day long. … I love your commands more than gold. … I delight in your commands because I love them.”
I read all those words and thought to myself, “Can’t relate.” Because what kind of person loves the law? The law is boring. The law is holding me back.
But one day, during a perfectly ordinary sermon, God met me in his Word. And he did so with a surprising and somewhat unrelated verse, Ephesians 5:18. The pastor had chosen to read from the NLT translation for this verse: “Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
The words “ruin your life” rang like a bell in my mind, because I felt like I was hearing the voice not of a tyrant or an uncaring ruler, but that of a loving father—one who knows what’s best for his children, and who actually cares about their lives.
What if obedience wasn’t just a drag, but was putting my trust in a God who loves me?
It was around this time that I found my heart asking new questions about this faith that I had taken for granted for many years. I wanted to know what the Christian life really looked like if it wasn’t just one of reluctant obedience, as I had previously assumed. In reading books by authors like John Piper, A. W. Tozer, and Andrew Murray, I was surprised to find that life in the gospel, and one of the marks of saving faith, is actually a life of joy and delight in God. I felt myself taking a hard look at my own faith and asking, “Is Christ my treasure, or are Christ’s gifts my treasure?” In this process of learning and reflecting, I felt my heart becoming more and more moved by the beauty of the gospel: how Jesus paid it all to redeem me. I began to feel a “new affection” changing my heart from the inside out.
During these college years, the Word started to come alive for me in a new and exciting way. I began to notice the story of God’s redeeming love in places I thought I wouldn’t, like the Old Testament, where God’s covenants and laws exist so that he can be in relationship with his people. It was incredible to find that the heart of the Father is everywhere in his Word. I marveled at passages like Romans 12:29-30, which illuminated God’s plan of salvation over my life, from the beginning of time until the very end.
But slowly, and without even realizing it over the years, my thoughts started to coalesce around one powerfully invasive belief: that the heart of the Father was not actually to be trusted; that God was actually not that good or loving at all; that, on the contrary, he was out to get me.
There were likely a few reasons why this idea became so powerful for me. For one, my college years were an incredibly challenging time for my family. Starting around 2013 when I was still in high school, my brother, who has down syndrome and autism, experienced a dramatic personality and behavioral shift. His rigid routines and preferences became even more rigid and obsessive. With limited vocabulary and poor impulse control, he often lashed out at us physically. At its peak around 2016, the violence was a multiple-times-a-day occurrence. It almost broke my parents, and it made me deeply afraid for myself and my family.
And a few more things happened that tested my belief in God’s love. A couple of months before I was due to graduate from college in 2019, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer at age 55. Between my mom’s chemo and my dad’s care for my brother, my graduation was very lonely.
At the same time, things were looking up, because I had achieved a real dream of mine, one that I had been working single-mindedly towards for years: a prestigious fellowship abroad. But when the pandemic hit, I found myself newly graduated and stuck at home. And I was never able to fulfill my fellowship.
It’s probably through all these situations that those seeds of doubt about God’s love were sneakily planted. I became gradually convinced that if things were going well in life for a bit, get ready, because the other shoe is about to drop. I began to secretly resent the idea that “all things work together for the good of those who love God” (Romans 8:28)—because to me, this felt like a cop-out, something that God says to justify terrible experiences way after the fact.
One nice thing that did happen during my grumpy, frustrated time at home during the pandemic was that I hopped back onto the dating apps and met a nice guy on the internet. But after talking for a few months and even making our relationship as “official” as we could despite the distance, I quickly hit the panic button.
The various elements of my life that felt like they had spun out of control were begging for me to take decisive action. God had clearly dropped the ball on my life and my plans, and if I didn’t do anything about it, who would? So, I wrote myself a ten-year, non-negotiable plan for my life. I decided that, among other things, there were no men in it, and I promptly broke up with my first boyfriend.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that I might have overreacted a bit. After a week of feeling very sorry for myself, I sheepishly asked him if he would take me back, and he graciously agreed. (That man would later become my husband.)
God used this experience to teach me that I am not in control in my life, and acting like I am doesn’t serve me at all. But it took years for me to truly recognize and learn to loosen my iron grip on the plans I created for myself, on the future that I thought was certain to take place. The next few years, even after moving to New York for school, I found myself living life bracing for the impact of my mother’s passing, bracing for what would happen if I had to take responsibility for my brother’s care, constantly worrying about what would happen to me and my plans if one day it simply all fell apart.
The reality of God’s work in my life, what I believe my testimony is at its core, is simply God’s steady, loving hand, and the ordinary ways that he has deepened my faith.
So, how does a heart change? I look back on the state of my heart and my faith in God just two years ago compared to now, and there is certainly a significant difference. But there really was no one big moment in the last few years that changed everything. In fact, there’s one word that summarizes this change best, and that is “ordinary.” The reality of God’s work in my life, what I believe my testimony is at its core, is simply God’s steady, loving hand, and the ordinary ways that he has deepened my faith.
His Word has fed me with life-giving sustenance, actively challenging my wrong beliefs and helping me to turn my gaze towards the truth of the gospel. Prayer has kept me rooted in relationship with him, even when—and especially when—I am scared, angry, or confused. His church, the relationships I have with fellow believers, has been crucial in helping me point my heart to the gospel once again.
Five years ago, I was a fearful Christian. I thought that it was simply too risky to trust in God’s goodness, that a life of anxiety was actually a practical necessity to keep me safe. But over the years, God has used these simple and ordinary means to shape my heart, to help me believe in that joyous truth that first captured my heart as a freshman in college: that life in him and in the gospel is not one of fear, but one marked by that “perfect love that casts out fear.”
God has used simple things to strengthen my faith, to help me believe in the truth of his love for me. And the proof was never to be found in how my life goes: but rather, in his Son’s sacrifice, the ultimate act of love. The truth of the gospel is what keeps me out of the pit of unbelief, especially when I barely notice that I’m slipping in.
Believing in the truth of God’s love for me—with his gospel as the unwavering proof—means that I no longer need to live my life walking on eggshells, bracing for impact, constantly looking for the catch.
I look back on my ten-year plan now and laugh at how completely off-track I am. God’s plan, the one that he’d written for me long before I was even born, is so unexpectedly good, and it is so much bigger and more beautiful than the one I had, quite literally, made for myself.
There are still things I’m afraid of, future what-ifs that stir up doubt in his goodness and love. As I think about building a family, even now I oscillate back and forth between wanting a child and being scared of having a child. What if it screws up my body, wreaks havoc on my life and my dreams? And I love my brother, but what if my child has some of the same challenges as him?
But I can’t control any of those things. No one can. For a long while, I convinced myself that I could. But I’ve found that God has given me the one thing I need to fight anxiety, to fight my desire for control and my fears about my future: and that is himself. And the more that I know him—his character, his love, his heart—that’s where true safety and security can be found. And the gospel is where I can find all of those things.
Through the gospel I experience God’s unconditional love for me. Through the gospel I receive a new identity as a child of God. That question which once filled my heart with anxiety—“Does God really love me?”—continues to be a compass for my soul. When I find myself doubting my answer, I know I must look to the beacon of the gospel to point me to the truth once again, to renew my heart and my faith. The gospel always guides me back to the joyous, fear-defeating, life-giving reality that is Jesus’ love for me.
And in the moments when I forget, and I find myself crying out again, “Do you really love me?” The gospel answers with an emphatic, unshakeable “yes.”
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