Growing Up Saved and Learning About Faith
I’m three years old, sitting on the stairs at my aunt’s house during a family gathering. I’ve just said something funny, and my aunt takes out her camcorder to have me say it again.
“Tell me what you said again, Kristen. Where is Jesus?”
I kick my little legs and respond, “Jethus ith in mah haht and he bit my tongue.”
Everyone laughs. I run off to play. I’m barely potty-trained, but I’ve just made a confession of faith.
I’m five years old, sitting in the front seat of my mom’s car, turning onto Holly Drive, Nana and Papa’s street. This will become one of my earliest memories. I say a quiet prayer in my head and turn to my mom and say, “I just asked Jesus in my heart!”
She smiles and says, “That’s great, Kristen!”
Growing Up Saved Through Childhood and Adolescence
I’m fifteen years old. Last week I got caught at the mall with a boy I met in a chat room. Dad spanked, and I’m grounded from prom and for life. I’m cleaning my room, and I find my Extreme Teen Bible under my bed and throw it.
Later that day, I find the tossed Bible lying open in a corner. I pick it up and glance at the devotion on the page: “Be encouraged! It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past, where you’ve done it, or who you’ve done it with. God loves you and wants to forgive you.”
I start crying. “Okay, Jesus. I’ll follow you now.”
I’m thirty years old. My husband, my kids, and I have just been pushed out of a church we love. I’m sad, angry, lonely, and scared. I’m not sure if anything I’ve believed until now is true anymore. I’m terrified of what that could mean for me. I write in my journal, “Have you ever loved me? Have I ever been worthy of your love? I’m not sure anymore. Maybe your promises weren’t for me.”
Growing Up Saved While Struggling With Shame
I’m approaching forty years old. My faith has unraveled in ways I never could have imagined at three, five, fifteen, or thirty. My journey with Christ has been complicated, frustrating, and beautiful. I have held on through mental health crises, traumas, and a late-in-life ADD diagnosis. And somehow I have come to peace—not the kind of peace I once chased through self-denial and spiritual striving, but peace with myself, and in that, peace with Christ.
Growing Up Saved and Believing God Was Disappointed
I have spent most of my life thinking God was disappointed in me. Many nights in my childhood were spent lying awake, listing every tiny thing I’d done “wrong” that day, just in case Jesus came back or I died in my sleep. Every breath I took felt like a threat to my eternal life, so I prayed my whole self away. I didn’t just think I was bad; I felt it deep in my bones. I don’t mean that in the general, fallen-world “we all sin and fall short” kind of way. I mean deep, personal, existential disappointment. I believed my very existence made God sigh. I grew up believing that holiness guaranteed you a life without struggle and that righteousness meant suppressing anything inconvenient or undesirable about yourself. I thought that if I prayed hard enough, disciplined myself enough, denied myself enough, I could finally become the kind of person God wanted me to be. I have journal pages filled with prayers begging God to change me.
Why did you make me this way?
Please break me and make me more like you.
I’m sorry I’m not good.
Growing Up Saved and Untangling Bad Theology
I didn’t realize then that the things I was begging God to change weren’t my “sin nature.” They were who I was—a reflection of the image of God in me. But because I had been formed in a faith framework where holiness was just as much about what could be perceived as it was a posture of the heart, I saw my uniqueness—my struggles, my emotions, even the way my brain worked—as barriers to being loved by God.
I spent years trying to break myself into pieces, attempting to get away from things that were just . . . me. I read the books. I attended the conferences. I rededicated my life at altar calls over and over again. I did my best to mold myself into the kind of person who would finally feel at home in her own skin. But instead of making me holy, it made me miserable. I hated myself, but I thought that was a virtue. I thought self-loathing was the appropriate response to a holy God.
That self-hatred had consequences. It affected my ability to form healthy friendships. It made me believe that love was something I had to earn. It made me anxious, obsessive, starved for approval.
When sin entered the world, it didn’t just break our relationship with God—it broke everything. It fractured our relationships, our sense of safety, even our connection to ourselves. We inherited shame, and that shame has made us hide ever since. And yet, when Adam and Eve hid, God searched for them. “Where are you?” he asked. He wasn’t disgusted by their nakedness. He didn’t withdraw his love. He went looking for them.
Growing Up Saved and Discovering True Freedom
For years, I believed that freedom meant perfection. That to be free in Christ meant to be free from my struggles, my doubts, my complexities. That once I arrived at some mythical level of spiritual maturity, I would finally feel loved and at peace. But that’s not freedom. That’s a trap. Real freedom—the kind Christ has given me—is the freedom to stop hiding. To stop pretending. To stop performing. To let go of the exhausting work of being acceptable and instead rest in the truth that I already am accepted.
I no longer believe that my struggles disqualify me from grace. I no longer believe that my identity is wrapped up in whether I get everything right. I no longer believe that God is standing over me with a cosmic clipboard, evaluating my worth. I no longer live my life flinching, waiting for divine punishment. I am free because I know who I am—loved, held, forgiven, covered, and safe.
Growing Up Saved and Resting in God’s Love
Maybe you’ve spent your life feeling like something in you is intrinsically broken. Maybe you’ve never felt like you are enough. Maybe you were taught that God’s love is conditional, that you need to get your act together before you can be embraced. Maybe you’re still carrying the weight of a faith that was formed in fear.
Growing Up Saved and Embracing the True Love of Jesus
I want you to know this:
You are loved by God.
You are also liked by him.
And it has nothing to do with what you have or haven’t done—it has everything to do with who he is.
God isn’t waiting for you to become someone else. He isn’t holding back his love until you reach some unattainable spiritual milestone. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to perform for it. You don’t have to prove you deserve it. You don’t have to contort yourself into the shape of someone holier, quieter, or more certain. You’re already his.
Many of us who grew up saved have to unlearn the weight of striving, the fear of getting things wrong, the exhaustion of trying to lift the heavy weight that bad theology and misunderstandings put around our necks. We have to relearn what God’s love really is—not the version handed down to us, but the true love of God that sets us free.
Adapted from Growing Up Saved: When Loving God Feels Like Losing Yourself by Kristen LaValley. Copyright © 2026. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Kristen LaValley is a writer, speaker, and advocate helping people untangle harmful beliefs about God and rediscover the freedom found in the true love of Jesus. Through honest storytelling and theological reflection, she encourages readers to move from fear-based faith toward grace-filled spiritual growth.
