To Know Love

In many ways, our relationships with others shape the way we view God (if we are believers). The truth is, many of us haven’t met or gotten to know God in His purest form. Instead, we often do one of two things:

1. We attribute the things we’ve heard about Him through others directly to Him.
2. We project aspects of our relationships with broken people (spoiler alert: we’re all broken in some form—it just looks different for each of us) onto God Himself.

For me personally, continuing to walk with God has been challenging because I had to confront something I didn’t want to admit: I didn’t fully trust Him and I didn’t have full confidence in Him.

I’ve never gone through a season where I denied that Jesus is the true and living God with my mouth. Growing up in the South, it was all I knew to confess. Later, I made the choice to believe for myself—but even then, I carried limitations in that belief.

As a child, I looked at how other believers around me—and even those I saw on television—lived, and I thought I could do the same. If they lived however they wanted, then surely I could too. But what I didn’t realize at that age was how deeply what I saw distorted both my walk with God and how I saw God Himself.

Being molested as a small child (until I was 13 years old) is another life-altering factor that shaped my relationship with Him. It took therapy for me to even realize that my deep sense of being unprotected as a child had been misattributed—first to my parents (especially my mom), and ultimately to God.

Without knowing it, I built a wall. And when the world around me started to shake, that wall eventually crumbled.

My hurt, my disappointment, my fears, my unmet expectations—those became the very things I blamed God for.
“God, why would You allow this to happen?
God, do You hate me?
Are You punishing me?”

Even now, I sometimes find those questions creeping back in. But here’s the difference: now I know I can bring them to God honestly, in a way I never did before.

Before, I asked those questions—but really, they were declarations disguised as questions. I proclaimed belief in God, but because of how life had unfolded, I never allowed myself to cultivate the most important part of that belief: a real relationship with Him. A relationship where I could come to Him with everything.

I am still unlearning a lot. But I desire to seek Him more. The more time I spend with Him, the more I begin to understand myself through His eyes.

And I know not everyone reading this is a believer. But my prayer is that you experience real love. Not conditioned love. Not restricted love. But a love that shows you that you have always been worth it.

A love that opens you up to healing.
A love that compels you to pour out that same love on others.

I pray you seek love—and that you find it. Amen.

@juss.shayla (IG) / thebakinglawyer (tiktok)