For a long time, I thought intimacy with God meant striving. Measuring up, staying strong and doing the right things well. Over time, I began to see how easily my performance dressed itself up as devotion. Good moral standards became burdens. Excellence turned into fatigued compliance. Personal convictions can quietly become laws we place on ourselves and others.
But the intimacy Jesus gives is different. It comes in truth and grace. It reaches into the places we have tried to hide, manage, numb, or survive. I know this because He met me there.
For much of my life, I carried a low, constant heaviness in my soul. It was not one clear emotion. It was deeper than fear, sadness, or anger. It was the inner sense that something was wrong with me, not just that I had done wrong things, but that I was wrong.
Even after I came to Christ and experienced the radical beauty of salvation, that low hum remained. I loved Jesus. I knew He was real. I knew His presence. But I did not yet understand how deeply the abandonment wounds and other wounds of my childhood and upbringing had shaped the way I saw myself, others, and even God. I felt angry. Hopeless. Inadequate. Unworthy to be around good people.
Looking back, I can see that I was not only trying to escape my circumstances. I was trying to escape the darkness I felt inside of me.
Healing did not come all at once. It unfolded slowly, over many years of seeking, counseling, prayer, failure, surrender, and the mercy of God. There was no single formula, though there was a clear path. No perfect prayer, just a direction to keep seeking. No one moment I can point to and say, "That was when everything changed.
But there was a turning point.
One unexpected day, my counseling sessions abruptly ended after five years. Abandonment was one of my deepest struggles and there I was, feeling abandoned, lost, and afraid. Though I’d done a tremendous amount of work in counseling by that point, it was such a familiar state for me. I thought I would never find my way out of the internal torment I had lived with for so long.
I went to church that Sunday almost robotically, with very little strength left in me. But my soul knew Jesus.
Near the end of the service, one simple cry began rising inside of me: "Have mercy on me, Son of David." Over and over again.
And then, in the last five minutes of the service, my pastor called out my name and gave me a brief prophetic word. It was not dramatic in the way people might expect. It was not what I thought I needed. But it was unmistakably God answering me.
Within days, something began to shift. The coping mechanisms that had once pounded on the door of my mind were no longer demanding entry. The constant inner torment began to quiet. I felt lighter. Freer. Almost as if something was missing, because something was.
The abandonment monster was no longer screaming.
That is when I began to understand freedom differently. Freedom was not just better behavior. It was not just trying harder. It was Jesus touching the place where shame of abandonment had lived and showing me that I was not the person that torment had told me I was.
As I returned to church life, ministry, and relationships, I began seeing familiar patterns in others, especially in mature believers and leaders. Perfectionism. Control. The need to legislate righteousness. The tendency to turn personal convictions into moral laws.
I recognized those patterns because I had lived them.
And I began to wonder how many people are serving God sincerely while still carrying unhealed wounds beneath the surface.
That is part of why this work matters to me. I know there is real freedom in Jesus — not pretend freedom, not polished language over private torment, but real freedom.
The Father has never desired His people to live in bondage. Bondage is not "suffering for Christ." Bondage is what compelled Jesus to go to the cross. Bondage is an enemy of God, an enemy of His Kingdom. God hates bondage.
Sin is bondage. Sexual addiction is bondage. Panic attacks are bondage. Demonic oppression is bondage. Hiding is bondage. Self-condemnation is bondage. Perfectionism is bondage. Your emotions were given to help you, not to enslave you — when they do, that is bondage too.
He shed His blood for all of it. For your freedom.
Things that are bound don't tie themselves up. Someone tied them. And it's time to go on a journey with Jesus to find out who — and why.
You can be free from the torment. There is absolutely hope. He did it for me, and I promise you, He deeply wants to do it for you.
You can go from "I can't" to "I did." Because I did.
If this landed
If you recognized yourself in any part of this — the low hum beneath the surface, the performance mistaken for devotion, the sense that something is wrong with you rather than just something you've done — I want you to hear this clearly: you don't have to carry it alone, and you don't have to manage it forever. I offer 1:1 coaching for people ready to go from surviving to free. Learn more about coaching →