When You Feel Unworthy

It has a particular shape, this feeling. Everyone else in the room seems to belong there, and you are the one who slipped in. You keep a private ledger of things about yourself that would change their minds. And the prayer you cannot quite say is the honest one: if You knew, You would not want me.

The timing is the argument. While we were yet. Not after we improved. Not once the ledger was balanced. While — in the middle of the very thing you are ashamed of, before the apology, before the change, before you had anything at all to show.

Shame tells you the order is: fix yourself, then be loved. Scripture keeps insisting on the reverse, and it is the harder of the two to believe, because it means there is nothing left to earn and no way to earn it.

You can stop auditioning. You were not let in on a technicality, and no one is reviewing the file. Say the honest prayer today, the one you were sure would disqualify you. It will not.