What we believe about ourselves matters. Are we worthy of being treated with respect? Yes we are. Every single one of us, no matter what our past may hold.

Are we worthy of being loved? Absolutely, as proven once and for all by our God. “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Done and done. Forever done.

Yet we need God to reveal His love for us personally. We need to know that His sacrifice was enough for everything and everyone.

We need to know that He means it when He tells us in 1 John 1:9 that whoever confesses his sins and repents is forgiven. We are cleansed. We are made new in Christ.

We come to faith and the old is gone, the new has come.

The newness needs to enter into the cracks in our hearts where our stories of harm remain. That is the business of Jesus, and that is why He came: to heal the brokenhearted and to set the places that remain captive in us free. He can and He will if we let Him. If we invite Him.

He will even rewrite our stories of love.

He’s been rewriting mine.

I wasn’t a wanted child.

I learned that early on, and my mother testified to the fact, telling me often of how she wept when she learned she was pregnant with me.

In what might have been meant as a redeeming aside, she told me that my father was happy to learn I was coming along.

Still, I wasn’t a child who was poured into or read to or played with or taken to ballet classes or summer camp. I was the invisible child and I needed to be. Being unseen helped set me up for abuse from a trusted relative.

I brought all my unhealed wounds into my marriage, by the way. I also brought them into my relationship with God. It was a revelatory day when my husband, John, told me, “I am not your father,” meaning that I could have a disagreement with him without being swallowed up whole by an unforgiving universe.

John didn’t love me as my father capriciously had. The door then opened to the possibility that neither did my Father God. Honestly, though, it took many more years of pursuing healing intentionally before I knew that what I had come to believe about love, and particularly about my own soul from my young years, was untrue.

But through increasingly believing and receiving the love of God, I have come to know that I am and have always been a wanted child.

The King of the universe planned on me being His before He even made the world. He planned on you as well.

I have come to know that I am worthy of love—yes, from a trustworthy and good man, but most deeply from a trustworthy and good God.

My story has changed from unwanted to wanted. From unseen to seen. From abandoned to sought after.

From forsaken to cherished. From neglected to pursued. From lost to found. From innocence stolen to rescued and restored. From ashes to beauty.

Yours can be too. I know this because this is what Jesus promises.

Adapted from The Ladder of Love by Stasi Eldredge. Copyright © 2026 by Stasi Eldredge. Used by Permission of Thomas Nelson. On sale 10/6/26. HarperCollinsChristian.com.

For deeper reflection, listen to Isaiah 61 today!

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