“How could Jesus love a girl like you?”
That’s the question a trusted adult asked author and speaker Billie Jauss after her father’s death while she was still a teenager shattered her heart, depleted her faith and moved her into some dark decisions and dangerous directions. “By the grace of God, I lived through the many crazy things I did,” she says on the Start Small, BELIEVE BIG podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “But I carried with me so many regrets of the bad behavior, so much shame because of my choices.”
But could God love her? And can He love us despite our past actions? Jauss explains, “We’ve all done things for which we are ashamed. We live with the tension of what we have been and what we want to be.
“Isn’t it interesting that in Philippians, Paul urges us to ‘forget what is behind and strain toward what is ahead’?” Jauss asks. “We’re not to take the past with us. We don’t have to have it all together. Our lives don’t have to be perfect.
“Perfection is something that I have struggled with over the years. I want others to think the best of me, I want to fit in with the crowd. But when I finally realized that all I needed to do was say yes to Jesus, that’s when it all started for me,” she says. “That’s when I felt the most secure, the most loved, when I realized that God knew who I was, saw everything that I had done, everything that I had said. He knew every thought, every question, every doubt, but yet through all of that, He loved me. He loved me because I had been made in His image.”
For more of Jauss’ teaching on how knowing God can bring us the peace and confidence we seek, click here to listen to the entire podcast. {eoa}
Curt Landry 
Michael L. Brown 
Rabbi Eric Tokajer 
