You’ve done so much becoming that you sometimes forget you’re still allowed to be unfinished. You forget that healing is not a requirement for love — that God does not wait at the finish line of your journey, assessing if your heart is finally worthy. And yet, despite all of the progress you’ve made, despite all of the ways you have fought to survive, there are still parts of you that feel undone. Corners of your soul that bruise easily. Memories that return when you least expect them to. You wonder if you’ll ever find the human being who will hold you in your tenderness. You wonder if love is something only reserved for the version of you that has finally finished the work.

But God has never waited for you to be perfect in order to call you worthy — so why should love?

Somewhere in the quiet shaping of your story, the world convinced you that love was a reward — something to be earned through performance, and perfection. Somewhere along your journey, you felt as if you had to prove that you were healed enough, whole enough, light enough to deserve softness. That love would only come once you had nothing left to unravel. You held your heart at a distance. You told yourself to wait until you were easier to love, until the mess was neatly organized, until the fear was dissolved. 

But healing is not a destination. It is a continual returning — to yourself, to God, to the truth that love was never meant to be the prize you would win at the end of your suffering.

The love that is meant for you — the kind that mirrors something divine, something holy, will not ask for you to hide the very places that taught you how to survive. It will not recoil at the sight of your scars or run from your dark. The human being who is meant to hold your heart will recognize your strength. They will see the ache and stay anyway — not to rescue you, or fix you, but to endure with you gently, to bear witness to the quiet courage it takes to still believe in tenderness after everything you’ve been through at the hands of this life.

And you’ll feel it, deeply. It will become so immensely clear that this love is different, that this love is rooted, because for the first time, you won’t feel like you’re auditioning for connection. You’ll simply be received. You’ll simply be honored.

This is how God moves. He is not waiting for the final version of you to show up before he accepts you. He is always meeting you in your becoming — in the soft, disorienting moments where your faith feels fragile and you choose to keep trusting despite it all. At the end of the day, the love he has written for you will mirror that same mercy, that same soul. It will honor the full landscape of your humanity — not just the polished chapters, but the in-between parts of your story, too.

If you have forgotten, this is your reminder:

You do not have to be fully healed in order to be fully loved. You only have to believe that love — the real kind of love, the lasting kind of love, does not see your brokenness as a burden. It sees it as proof that you stayed tender, that you kept going, that you never stopped reaching for the light — and that is more than enough. That is more than enough.