The closer I get to God, the more ashamed I am of who I was.

Truth be told: I always said I believed in God. I considered myself a follower of Christ. I spoke of God's love, His grace, His word. But believing in God and walking with Him are two completely different things. I believed in Him, yes, but I wasn't close to Him. I wasn't devout. I didn't truly pray. I didn't seek His presence. I didn't read the Bible with a hunger for transformation.

Now, in these last few years, the closer I get to God today, the more I try to know Jesus and live like Him, the more uncomfortable it becomes to look back and encounter the person I was.

Because one of the most painful things about spiritual growth is discovering that the problem wasn't always other people. Sometimes it was you too.

For many years I lived defensively. I treated the world as if it were my enemy. And honestly, part of that was born out of pain. From my adolescence, from my high school and college years, I saw friendships break, people leave, people abandon me, disappointments that little by little hardened something inside me. I learned to expect harm. I learned to suspect people's intentions. And without realizing it, I built a version of myself that supposedly protected me, but in reality, it was turning me into someone who also caused harm.

If you weren't with me, you were against me. That's how simply I saw the world.

And that mindset began to rot things within me. Resentment became normal. Revenge began to feel just. If someone hurt me, I wanted them to feel the same. If I suffered, the other person also had to suffer. In my mind, that was justice. But it never gave me peace. It never made me feel whole. All it did was feed a version of myself that increasingly resembled Christ less and all the people who had hurt me before more.

The worst part is that innocent people ended up paying for wounds that never belonged to them. One of my best friends was a victim of that. She got caught in an absurd rivalry I had with someone else and ended up being collateral damage from an emotional conflict she didn't even understand. I treated her horribly. And even today, it pains me to admit it. The irony is that the same person was one of those who helped me realize who I was becoming. God used people to confront me with myself, and honestly, there is no more uncomfortable mirror than that.

Because the closer you are to Jesus, the more evident everything within you that doesn't resemble Him becomes. You start to notice the arrogance you once justified, the harshness you called "protection," the emotional coldness you confused with maturity, the pride hidden behind every reaction. And there comes a point where you can no longer solely blame your past. You have to accept responsibility for the person you chose to be because of that pain.

And that weighs heavily.

It weighs heavily to realize that you burned bridges. That you damaged friendships. That you affected relationships that will probably never be the same again. It weighs heavily to understand that some apologies come too late and that there are wounds that don't disappear simply because you finally understood the harm you caused. One of the hardest things I'm learning is to accept who I was without trying to hide it or completely justify it. Yes, the world was cruel to me many times. Yes, there were people who hurt me deeply. But my pain did not justify becoming someone who also hurt others.

And yet, in the midst of all that shame, I believe God transforms even that.

Because the closer I get to Him, the less desire I have to defend the person I was. I no longer want to romanticize my harshness or celebrate revenge as strength. Now I understand that true spiritual transformation doesn't happen when you learn more Bible verses or when you appear to be more "correct." It happens when God begins to break the ego you built to survive. It happens when you can finally look back and say: "I don't want to become that person again."

I cannot change the past. I cannot erase the harm I did. I cannot demand that anyone forget who I was. All I can do now is live in a way that genuinely honors God. Not just by saying I believe in Him, but by striving every day to become more like Jesus. Because when I look at Christ, I don't see resentment seeking revenge. I don't see pride desperate to be right. I see grace. I see patience. I see love. And I see someone who profoundly confronts me, because the more I know Him, the more I realize how much I still need to change.

“Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.”
— Psalm 139:23-24