I grew up in a Christian home where God wasn't someone we visited on Sundays. He was a part of our daily life.
Every morning, my siblings and I would pray and read from the children's edition of Our Daily Manna devotional booklet.
My mother bought them monthly, without fail. My brother would read the devotional aloud and explain it to us. We would read the Bible passages together, pray the prayers, and memorize the verses.
Whenever we had children's week or a special church program, we would be in the procession, quoting those verses, our voices a confident timbre, our faces shining with pride.
In the children's church, I learned all the Bible stories. As we grew up, my mother bought us stacks of Christian novels: stories about missionaries, martyrs, faith, and miracles. I devoured them. I cherish those books now, but back then, they were just part of our library.
At seven years old, I joined the children's choir. It felt like a natural progression. Church was where we belonged, and being good was simply who I was. I was a very good child.
I loved to write stories and draw. I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up, someone who could shape young minds. I was my teacher's favourite. Every time she asked a question, she would call on me, and whenever we took an exam, she would fish out my script to grade it first and use it as a guide for the rest of the class.
I always took first position. If it wasn't first, it was second. If I had a particularly bad term—and I mean really bad—then I would take third position. That was how good I was. I was remarkably good at being good. Do you see?
I did not break rules. I did not speak back at my mom or teacher. I did not skip school, cheat during tests, or participate in the rowdy fights of childhood.
I was the precise specimen every parent desired—obedient, respectful, and responsible. I made adults smile and say, “If only all children were like her.”
When I turned seventeen, I gave my life to Christ. That is what we called it, at least. In reality, it was a prerequisite to become an official worker in our church. I badly wanted to join the main choir, and the worker's training required it. Everyone in my age group was doing the same, so it seemed like the correct thing to do in a well-ordered life.
That day, I sat in church and listened to our pastor preach with great fervor about sin, damnation, and salvation. He spoke of being washed clean, of turning one's back on an old life to walk into a new one. When the call came to step forward, I joined, but I did not feel the heavy transformation I was hoping to feel.
All around me, people were weeping. They cried in agony, their bodies trembling under the weight of conviction. Some fell to their knees, while others lay on the floor, manifesting their deliverance, shaking and crying out as ministers and prayer warriors gathered over them.
I was somewhat jealous. I wanted so much for my story to be like theirs—the drama, and the evidence that something real and powerful was happening. I wanted to feel the weight of my sin being lifted off me. But I felt nothing. My salvation story lacked the necessary tragedy I thought it should have had.
I wasn't sleeping around. I wasn't stealing. I didn't kill anyone. I clearly wasn't a cultist like the guy who sat close to me that day, sobbing his heart out. By the world's standards, I was perfect. I didn't even have my first boyfriend until I was nineteen.
So why was I standing there among the broken, when I had not actually done anything bad?
I prayed the sinner's prayer because that was the protocol. I said the words and meant them—or so I thought. But deep down, I did not understand why I needed saving. What, exactly, was I being rescued from? I was already good.
For years, that question lingered. My goodness became a fortress, a comfortable shield that kept me safely detached from the brokenness of the world. Because I didn't commit the sins people could see and immediately condemn, I assumed I was spiritually secure.
This outward perfection bred a deep, subconscious arrogance. Whenever I heard about someone else making a catastrophic mistake, my immediate internal response was a protective wall: It can never be me.
I believed I was a good person, and that belief gave me a silent license to judge. If someone wronged me, I dismissed them completely, telling myself they had absolutely no right to treat me that way because I was above reproach.
I checked all the boxes, kept my curfew, made the grades, and sang in the choir. I was judging myself strictly by outward appearance, completely blind to the reality of my own soul.
What I didn’t realize then was that while my behavior was flawless, my heart was growing desperately heavy with pride.
That is the terrifying, silent danger of being a good girl.
When you commit an outward sin like stealing or fighting, someone can see it, confront you, and offer corrections. But the sins of the mind are stealthy. Nobody can see your pride, your malice, your secret contempt, or your deep-seated grudges.
Because nobody can see them, nobody corrects you. They are left alone in the dark corners of your soul, where they grow and fester beneath a beautiful, pious smile.
The shift in my faith didn’t happen during a fiery church service. It happened much more recently, and it was quiet.
The Holy Spirit began to peel back the layers of my pristine presentation, forcing me to look into a mirror I had avoided my entire life. For the first time, I was forced to look at my actual thoughts: the internal impurities, the hidden envies, and the secret desires I entertained while pretending to be perfect.
Suddenly, the scripture I had memorized as a little girl for a quiz competition stopped being a sequence of words to recite. It became a diagnosis: “The heart of man is desperately wicked above all things, who can know it?” ~Jeremiah 17:9
The ultimate breaking point came when the line between my hidden thoughts and reality finally blurred. I found myself caught up in a moment where I compromised my morals and crossed an intimate boundary I had spent my entire life policing in others.
Before that moment, I honestly believed I was just stronger than everyone else—that my purity was a product of my own superior willpower. I thought I could dance on the absolute edge of temptation and handle it. I can do it, so why can't they? I used to ask myself.
But the fall taught me otherwise. The very thing I had spent my entire life pointing at and proclaiming, “It can never be me,” actually became me.
My fortress crumbled completely. I realized the devastating truth: we are all just weak men and women, held strong only by the Holy Spirit. I wasn’t better than the murderer, the thief, or the prostitute. I had simply been better at hiding. I was judging their visible actions while ignoring my own capacity for the exact same choices.
I remember closing my eyes and stripping myself of the titles, the church achievements, and the good girl persona that had protected my ego for so long. For the first time in my life, I didn’t pray from a place of performance. I just wept, finally feeling the gut-wrenching weight of my own brokenness. My prayer was, “Jesus, I’m sorry. Please, just have mercy on me.”
In that moment of total surrender, I finally understood the concept I couldn't grasp at seventeen. I finally understood why Jesus had to die for me. He didn't just die to save people from the streets; He died to save the good girl from her own suffocating self-righteousness. It is only the Holy Spirit that truly helps a person, rescuing us from the pride that tells us we don't need a Savior.
I still strive to live well, and I still sing, but I know the truth now. The sin of the heart is the hardest to correct, but it is where God desires truth.
I don’t judge people anymore. When I see someone fail, I no longer think it can never be me. Instead, I look at them and recognize a sibling in need of the exact same grace.
I have stepped down from the judge's seat and taken my rightful place in the exact same line as every other broken soul, holding out my hands for the only thing that can ever truly save us: an impossibly good God, and His completely undeserved mercy.