The Way Forward Through a Relationship with God

The Struggle with Unworthiness

The Unashamed Unafraid podcast recently shared the powerful story of Nick and Anja, a couple who have navigated significant personal challenges. Their journey highlights the deep-seated struggle with feelings of unworthiness that many of us can relate to.

Like Nick, it’s easy to believe that past mistakes or current struggles make us unworthy of love. And like Anja, difficult feelings can stem from our perceptions of our physical attributes or limitations. These feelings of inadequacy can cloud our view of God and ourselves, leading us to believe that we are somehow not good enough.

God Sees Us Differently

Many, like Nick, grow up believing they must earn God’s love or prove their worthiness. Nick’s and Anja’s struggles illustrate how easily we fall into an exhausting cycle - always striving but never feeling enough - which can numb us and disconnect us from life and others. But God’s love isn’t based on performance. He isn’t waiting for us to fix ourselves before accepting us. He sees our failings and shortcomings and still reaches out with love and acceptance.

Entering a Relationship with God

God lovingly invites us into a relationship where we can rest in His unconditional love. Yet, misunderstandings about His nature, expectations, and our own worthiness often hold us back. We must see Him not as a distant, watchful judge, but as the very embodiment of boundless, patient love. Yes, He is just—but through a relationship with Him, He offers us mercy and grace instead of the judgment we deserve.

A relationship with God is not entered by performance—it’s entered by faith. It begins with recognizing that we are wretched creatures in need of help. At the same time, we lean into His unconditional love and power to give us the help we need. Finally, in humility, hope, and curiosity, we reach out to Him for acceptance, nurture, protection, and transformation. When we do, we find comfort, peace, and joy—not because we have finally proven ourselves, but because we allow ourselves to receive what was always available.

When Nick prayed, he felt what he described as a "big warm hug"—a moment of peace, comfort, and love that reassured him he was accepted. This is what God longs for all of us to feel. Once we shift from trying to earn God’s love to simply receiving it, everything changes. The pressure to prove something disappears, and instead, we are freed to rest in God’s embrace.

A Relationship with God Changes the Way We Show Up in Life

When God’s love becomes the foundation of our identity, it transforms:

• How we see ourselves

• How we navigate challenges

• How we interact with others

Nick spent years trapped in shame—feeling unworthy and trying to compensate through effort. But when Warrior Heart bootcamp helped him step into his relationship with God, he began healing from a place of security rather than guilt. Freed from shame, he could finally move forward with hope.

For Anja, understanding God’s love helped her shift from feeling like a burden to knowing she was deeply loved just as she was. From that platform, she was able to support Nick—not from insecurity or codependency, but from compassion and strength. She could offer love freely, without feeling responsible for fixing him.

Relax with me into a relationship with God where He will ultimately change us, but where we’ll always be enough.

By Ty, Writing Team

The Next Step

I’m learning a lot about faith.

It isn’t to have God reveal all things to me and then move confidently into the future.

Instead it is to trust He has a plan for me without the fidelity of facts about my future - other than that He loves me - and I am to move forward and take the next step despite a large host of uncertainties.

Last year - as God would have it - someone I met seemingly randomly was going through a terrible time with his family’s health and pending uncertainties. While the circumstances of his life and what I’ve gone through are not the same, we share many common denominators of fear, pain, uncertainty, and loneliness in our grieving.

I’ve known him about a year now and while health situations at his home have gotten worse, there also has been a massive miracle. A baby has been born against all odds and lives while the uncertainty of the mother hangs precariously by a thread, so thin it can hardly be seen.

Not knowing the most recent developments, I had called him this week to unload and to surrender my own burdens, but found him in dire distress. I, myself, had dark nights a few years ago when I thought my wife would die overnight and leave me a widower. Those nights turned into weeks and months. His Hell is deeper and darker.

I asked what he was doing to survive.

He shared some personal things not appropriate for me to repeat, but the recent inspiration he received is universal to all suffering.

“Take the next step.”

God will reveal the next thing for me to do right now but often not the one after until I have completed or at least started the first one.

This time of year, I suffer from seasonal anxiety which - if left unchecked - has historically turned into depressive episodes. In the past I would wallow and go deep and not resurface for several months. It started earlier than normal as I had a major career change last September which introduced a lot more financial uncertainty than in previous years.

What has changed in recovery is that when the darkness begins to gather, I reach up to God and I change my state through exercise, meditation, and reaching out. Moving to Arizona where most days are sunny and warm and where I have proximity to family has also helped immensely.

I desire certainty, but God keeps reminding me that only His love is certain. Everything else just isn’t the point.

Just as Peter the Apostle fretted and feared about how to pay taxes and Jesus told him to go drop his line in the water and the first fish he caught would be enough to pay the debt, Christ reminds me to render that which is of the world to the world and to be loved. To be beloved.

No matter how dark your current trials are, I pray you remember these things.

God loves you.

You are beloved.

Yes, this pain and suffering sucks. It seems unfair and dark and twisted.

But please have faith and take the next step.

In my experience of pain and anguish, God has never left me alone when I seek Him. And He has always sent angels on both sides of the veil to comfort me and help me to identify the next step.

My prayer for you is that you find that same comfort in your current misery.

And that you take the next step.

By Pete, Writing Team

The Arithmetic of Recovery

There is an arithmetic to recovery that just doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen it many times in my eight years of attending 12-step groups, the Warrior Heart bootcamp, and any other meeting where people are sincerely trying to be better.

In each of these settings, people will come with their problems, share them as they feel moved to, and then leave with greater peace. And this doesn’t just happen when one or two people are weighed down and everyone else helps them, either. More often I’ve seen meetings where everyone arrived feeling down in the gutter, yet still everyone left feeling lifted. When I’ve seen that happen I’ve marveled at it, wondering which of us did the lifting if all of us were coming from below?

I guess it would make more sense to me if each person had the solution for someone else’s problem…but usually that isn’t the case either. Usually the sort of problems being shared aren’t the sort that one can just reach over and fix for someone else. Things like unyielding waves of shame, or deep marital problems, or a lifelong yearning for God; these are the sort of problems where all you can do is love, support, and commiserate.

So if nothing is getting “fixed,” how do we all end up feeling better? Where did the joy come from if none of us entered the meeting with it? It feels like we’re all getting something for nothing.

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve developed two theories as to what’s going on here. Personally, I think both are true.

Correct Posture

My first theory is that people are just made to share their burdens with one another, so we naturally feel better when we start doing it. This gives us the benefit of beginning something good, as well as the cessation of something bad.

When I first opened up my heart to tell a group all my secret shames and fears, I found that I actually didn’t even care how they reacted, I was just relieved to finally stop holding all of these things in. I realized that I was never meant to live in such secrecy. Doing so had twisted knots inside of me and just being honest released that tension all by itself. The love and compassion that came from my group was an extra bonus!

When I kept my problems to myself it was like trying to move forward while holding a great weight in an unnatural, hunched over position. When I shared my problems, even without receiving solutions, I felt like I was shifting into the upright, natural pose I was always meant to move in. It just felt right.

One in the Midst

Jesus taught his followers that “where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” (Matthew 18:20). He told them this when he was still present with them in the flesh, but it seems clear that he was pointing forward to the time after his crucifixion, instructing them on how they could summon him in spirit after he had gone.

Earlier I mentioned that I have seen group meetings where everyone arrived feeling low, yet everyone left with peace and lightness. Where did the burdens go and where did the peace come from? I believe the answer to both is the unseen Savior in the midst. I believe that Christ’s spirit is present in any group that gathers in his name, and where the attendees are there with sincerity of heart to become better men.

If five men come together, and each one feels negative, then normally that would create a compounding negativity:

-1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 = -5

But if they gather in the name of Jesus, with sincerity of heart, then he is literally the X factor that can turn that equation positive:

-1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 + X = +10

We can go to those meetings and throw all of our emotional debts into the pot, then draw from the reservoir of riches that Jesus imparts to each of us. That is the miracle and the arithmetic of group recovery!

By Abe, Writing Team