What Religion Taught Me About Owning My Mistakes

I am not very good at self-love; my brain is preoccupied with past mistakes. No matter how low my self-esteem gets, I know that, if I did not love myself on some selfish level, I would not even care enough to hate myself. That might sound counterintuitive, but low self-esteem just feels like self-pity these days. I want to be bigger than that.

Apologies are difficult when you spend a lot of time convincing yourself that you are more unredeemable than everyone else.

But I still need to apologize. As a human, I make mistakes. And, when I make a mistake, if someone points it out, I know I need to apologize and mean it. Even when no one says anything about it, the voice in my head does, and she can talk for years. 

But sometimes, I’ve convinced myself that “sorry” will not ever cover my mistakes – maybe I only apologize to make myself feel better, desperate to know that that is not the case. Even through self-loathing, I always defend myself.

What happens when you don’t realize you need to apologize for a mistake until long after it happens?

I wish I knew the answer to that question. Today, someone confronted me about a mistake I made over a year ago, one that had no repercussions for any other human being until today. It’s awful when a private error turns into a public hurt. The shame was an earthquake in my heart – I felt like I might stop breathing. I said sorry,  asked forgiveness, and rinsed and repeated. But, while someone can forgive you for a mistake, you can’t undo what happened. 

My faith helps me process guilt, but I’m not always a theologically sound Christian when it comes to forgiveness. I struggle to accept and ask for it, ashamed and believing  I‘m too bad to ever come into the light. If I make even the slightest of blunders, I worry that God will close the gates to me eternally.

Many of us struggle to reconcile the forgiveness of God with the pain of the people whom we love and whom we hurt from time to time. We only see one of those things in front of our faces, where it stings. Do we deserve forgiveness from a creator who is not granted by his creation? I know that the Bible says yes, but often, my heart says something different. 

I suppose I’ve come to this conclusion: God can forgive you, and the person you sinned against, and still see you as a sinner. One does not negate the other. 

Sometimes, we have to make peace with our imperfections and hope in something greater than ourselves. This does not mean avoiding accountability, but instead embracing it – the human guilt and the divine redemption that accompanies it. 

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash