Starting from here

For the longest time I thought the whole point of Christianity was for me to spend my life trying to be good as possible because then if I were lucky I might get into heaven. If God was in a good mood with me he might begrudgingly forgive me for being a terrible evil person and let me in, and that was only if I was lucky. Chances were he would take one look at me and send me to hell anyway, however hard I tried

I learnt this from

1)My adoptive parents who were crazy horrible people who didn't really want me and taught me I was a terrible worthless selfish person and that God was ashamed of me, that nobody really liked me, they just put up  with me and felt sorry for me and  that life was a series of checks and balances and if I didn't empty myself out completely then other people, and especially not God, wouldn't give me the basic things that I needed

2)The church I grew up in. There were some really good things about that church but it had very rigid  often seemingly arbitrary rules on how good Christians behaved, which I failed most of the time, from reading the wrong sort of books (I remember being taught that fantasy fiction was a gateway to demonic spirits)  to being a giant queer.

I think often the way we think  about Gods love is built around the shape of our parents love, or lack of, so not only were my parents telling me that I was a waste of space and not worthy of Gods love they were showing me this through their own actions

And then I grew up, in the most convoluted manner ever, and learnt things along the way about how my parents were wrong about pretty much everything, about how my queerness, the fact I look at and sometimes love other women, the fact that I fail at every aspect of femininity, were okay. I learnt about feminism, about secular social justice, about how my body is okay even though it doesn't work like it’s supposed to. I learnt there are good things about me, that I'm pretty smart and funny, that I’m  generous and loyal, that I write amazing poetry and make delicious soup. I learnt that it's okay to think and even say out loud “yeah actually, I’m a pretty okay person.”  I learnt eventually (and still hesitantly sometimes) that the people that love me really do love me and are not just hanging around because they feel sorry for me, or watching me like a hawk just waiting for me to mess up so they can judge me on how worthless I really am.

But I never really unpicked some of the negative stuff I learned about God. I just kind of put it in a box and taped it up and never looked at it, even when I went back to church I couldn't make it work for me because I hadn't processed all the stuff in the box, unlearned it. I just felt guilty all the time for not being good enough for God. There was still a part of me always thinking that it didn't matter what I did anyway because I was going to hell.

But recently some things clicked together in my head

The first being that actually I think the point of Christianity is not to tie yourself in knots trying to be good enough to get into heaven while knowing that you are actually worthless and useless, but the point of Christianity is to have a relationship with God (What does that mean? I’m still not really sure yet, I guess working that out is a lifelong process and that's partly what i'm doing here.)

The second being that God doesn't love me like my parents “loved” me with a judgmental, abusive, vicious, belittling, waiting for me to fail, kind of "love"  But that God loves me like my best friends parents love her and her sister, only more so, because best friends parents while being awesome are still imperfect humans.

These two realizations pretty much tilted the way I think about, well, everything, and that maybe it is okay to go back to God and say "I don't know what i'm doing, but hey, I'm here, i'm not perfect but i'm not terrible either, can we see where this goes?" So that's pretty much what I'm doing right now.