God’s love is infinite.

God’s love for you is beyond imagination.

God is love.

Love is patient and kind.

Love is long-suffering.

Love never fails.

But then there’s the whole wrath thing.

Work hard.

Prostrate, be contrite.

Be pure; be humble.

Be kind. Be compassionate and long-suffering.

Forgive.

Be perfect.

And when God shows up, he’ll shake his head. Sorry, kid, not perfect enough, and sentence you to eternal torture.

We create gods that are all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, the essence of purity, compassion, and love. But then we infuse them with the basest of human emotions—anger, jealousy, retribution—even hate. If we want to insist that a thing is divine, above the fray, then we can’t also insist that it take the form of our small-minded perception, cannot insult it with our most basic of human turmoil and identity.

God is beyond our human understanding is what they taught me.

Then stop insisting you understand him, that you know him, that he (or she, as the delusional case may be) speaks to you.

If God has been, and will be, as promised by countless prophets, so completely consumed by the basest of human emotions of fury, disappointment, and retribution as to destroy everything he previously created; if divinity cannot rise above all of the things it expects us to rise above, then divinity isn’t so beyond understanding, and the human isn’t so far from the divine.

But that’s blasphemy.

Recently, in the midst of my dreams, I awoke submerged in a panic attack, and as I methodically walked myself through the breathwork I’m so familiar with to calm my nervous system, I was face-to-face with yet another element of my lack—betrayal—and God was at the center.

I’ve often fought with the notion that everyone, everywhere, all of the time, is, has, or will betray me. I’m sick with the fear of it, of being lied to, tricked, duped. As a child, most adults in my life lied to me at some point, not harmless little tooth-fairy tales, but monumental, development-altering betrayals. I’ve understood this for quite some time and have made my peace with it as I can trace the effects and mitigate them for the most part.

But I’d never looked deeper than that—to God.

God was the kind of dude who would wipe the floor with you, toss you about like a branch in a hurricane, tear limb from limb, curse you with disease, wrench you from everything you ever loved—

Are you still true?

Are you still prostrate?

Do you still believe?

Are you still grateful?

Yes, Lord, anything you ask. It is an honor to suffer for you.

Perfection alludes. The pursuit has hollowed you out, emaciated your life force, but you’re determined to be worthy.

And then.

God says, Nah, not quite; enjoy the flames.

You know it is your own fault and try not to wonder: why, if everything is in God’s control and part of God’s plan, and you’re really just supposed to follow his will, then how is this thing your will if everything else is his will?

You are not yet ten, but you’ve been playing out this particular future on repeat more times than you can count.

It is the ultimate betrayal by the ultimate divine abusive parent.

That is what it means to be a child of evangelical faith.

And if you accept abuse from the ultimate parent and believe that you deserve the punishment, it’s second nature to accept it from the lesser human authoritarians in your life.

In the end, my Savior wasn’t Jesus or any grand divinity from outside of me. My Savior was that of purest form, my child self, who persisted, who pushed and squirmed and stomped her little feet, who expanded her tiny but mighty self, dedicated, over the years to dislodging and neutralizing every last bit of twisted belief.

She knew that I didn’t deserve it.

Becoming our truest and best selves isn’t a journey into the beyond understanding, the larger-than-life divine. It is a journey to the purest form of us, our child selves, our wide-eyed, unencumbered selves when knowing wasn’t a thing out there, being wasn’t a thing to be defined, and magic wafted up from every footprint left by our wobbly, little feet.

That girl is the one who saved me because she knew, and she never surrendered her knowing.

That girl is divinity. She is me, and she is you. She is earth, and she is sky. She whispers, and she bellows, she beseeches, and she commands, because no matter our resistance or denial, she will be heard, and she will be born, and if we let her, she will grow us into our truest, most dazzling selves.