God Hates Me

I’ve Always Felt So

I’ve Always Felt So

Like my existence comes with an unspoken disclaimer: you are allowed to breathe, but you are not allowed to be loved.

Not because I did something.

Not because I earned it.

Just a verdict deeper than memory.

Just the way the world is.

Just because of who I am.

The Day I Couldn’t Find My Bible

I had taken psilocybin.

Whatever else psychedelics do, they turn your mood into a universe. They can make sunshine on the grass feel like heaven, or they can pull the floor out from under you.

That day, they turned my inner doubts into a nightmare.

In that nightmare, I couldn’t find my Bible.

I wasn’t looking for my Bible because I wanted Scripture. I’d love to tell you I was that faithful. No. I was looking for it because that’s where I kept my cash. I was working pizza delivery and lunch-hour salad-maker at a restaurant in La Jolla, living with a roommate who was growing pot in the closet and selling cocaine on the side. I didn’t learn about the cocaine until shortly before I moved out. The whole place was bankrolled by his dad, so the cash rent I paid went straight to him.

That cash stayed inside my Bible. But after I downed a chocolate shake still chunky with the grossest mushrooms I’ve ever swallowed, I became afraid my other roommate—the poor one who slept on a mattress on the floor—had stolen it. So I went to check.

I searched everywhere.

I kept searching.

The panic did what panic does. I was inside a massive falling world where nothing held its shape. Gravity felt wrong. Time bent. Every thought echoed like it was the only thing left in the universe. Reality kept collapsing and reforming around the fear, and I couldn’t find the edge of it.

I ended up in the back of my truck, under the shell, hearing a helicopter go overhead, in a fog far beyond depression or dread. I was forsaken. I was abandoned. I knew it in the roots of my soul:

God hated me.

Repentance

Later, after what felt like an eternity of madness, I found the Bible right beside my bed.

It wasn’t gone. There was no thief. But was the verdict true?

More important: had I lived inside that sentence for hours, or had I been living inside that fear my entire life?

It wasn’t long after then that I started going to church again. I began reading my Bible. I started believing that God wanted me to draw near to Him, and I’ve never looked back from that hope.

But somewhere along the way, I never let go of that hate.

Not my hate for God. My hate for me, projected emotionally onto Him and reinforced by a world run by the voice of the accuser.

In this endless trial, everything became evidence. If something went wrong, it was my fault. If something went well, it was a setup. If someone was kind, they were just being nice. If someone was distant, I deserved it. If I felt hope, it was arrogance. If I felt desire, I was selfish. If I felt grief, I was guilty.

I was alive, and it was a death sentence.

Not Conscience

You may not have lived next door to madness the way that I did that long afternoon in La Jolla. But I think somewhere deep down you have felt the same.

Maybe not all the time. Maybe not as deeply. But you’re still reading, which means you are at least passingly familiar with this courtroom.

Conscience is a gift. Conscience convicts. Conscience points toward repentance and repair. Conscience brings you back into reality under Jesus Christ. But the courtroom of the accuser is a counterfeit. The devil does not convict to heal. Unclean spirits accuse to crush. The goal of the malignant is not reconciliation. The aim of the incurvatus is self-prosecution.

Self-shame, which most people call self-pity, does not produce fruit. It produces paralysis, bargaining, despair, and superstition. A cold day becomes a cosmic meaning. A delayed prayer becomes a final verdict. A misunderstanding becomes a prophecy. A closed door becomes God’s voice:

You are unsafe.

You are wrong.

You are unwanted.

You will be punished.

These thoughts aren’t random. They have a structure. A theology. A script. They train you in distrust. They make you brace for punishment even in hope. They interpret kindness as bait and correction as hatred.

That is What Makes It Demonic.

Recently, I apologized to my mother.

For the last several years, on the advice of someone who was close to me, I distanced myself from her. I came to believe that she and my father (who went to rest two years ago) were the problem in my life, that my childhood had left me with scars I could not overcome, that my present darkness needed to be lain at their feet.

Then the veil was torn away in one surreal and radical moment.

In the days that followed, I saw something that didn’t fit. Then I started to see how it all added up. Bit by bit, I understood that the story had been inverted.

I was not raised in a home where accusation was the primary spirit. I grew up with the standard fractures of an American latchkey childhood; television as babysitter; exhaustion and distance; both parents working; the ordinary ache of a world that doesn’t know how to be gentle. Further, whether it was my intelligence level, too many vaccines or Tylenol, I definitely missed out on a few social pack dynamic factors that I only learned how to see since I tuned my efforts toward them after 2020. But underneath all of it, I remember most of all being raised in a home founded on grace.

I always knew that I could come home. I always knew that I would be wanted. I always knew that I would not be turned away. I always knew that no matter how bad things got, we were a family and that meant we would stick together.

So I called her. And I said it:

“I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have distanced myself from you. I listened to the wrong person. But it’s my fault. You’re my mother. I should never have treated you like this. it was wrong. I’m sorry.”

I was weeping. Choking. Fighting back my breaking heart to get breath to finish, feeling the endless tribunal I’d been programmed to absorb threaten me with humiliation and shame and a million reasons why I deserved every ounce of verdict I would hear back. It was like walking out of prison knowing that the guards would be armed to kill.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she said. “I forgive you. I didn’t understand. I’ve been so worried. I love you. You’re my son.”