For most of my life, I believed God was punishing me.
I never said it out loud quite like that. But it was the running narrative underneath. When something painful happened, when I felt deprived, when something didn’t go my way, the quiet ego whisper was always the same:
“You’re being punished. You did something wrong. You deserve this.”
Many of us have been carrying that frightened whisper for years.
Here’s what I’ve come to see, and what A Course in Miracles keeps trying to show us:
God doesn’t punish.
Never has. Never will.
ACIM tells us plainly: God doesn’t believe in retribution. God’s mind doesn’t create that way. God doesn’t hold our perceived “evil deeds” against us, because there’s nothing to hold.
So who’s been doing the punishing?
We have.
This is hard to take in at first. We’ve been so committed to the idea that the punishment is coming from somewhere outside us. From God. From karma. From “the way things are.”
But the truth is much closer to home.
The guilt we carry, we projected onto God. The punishment we feel, we’ve been generating ourselves.
We label ourselves as bad. As wrong. As not lovable. As not good enough. And then we live in a world that seems to confirm those labels at every turn.
That’s not God’s doing. That’s our own ego thought system, running on the unconscious belief that we’re sinners deserving punishment.
Here’s the good news: if we’re the ones doing it, we can be the ones who stop.
We can put down the inner courtroom. We can stop sentencing ourselves to a lifetime of low-grade self-attack. We can recognize that the verdict was never God’s to begin with.
It was always ours. And it can be released.
The healing begins the moment we’re willing to see it.
Not understand it. Not analyze it. Just see it. And then offer it to the Higher Holy Spirit Self for transformation.
The healing is happening NOW!
This week, I’d like to invite us into this work together. My Healing Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop is this Saturday, May 16. Many of us are carrying religious guilt we don’t even recognize as religious guilt. It’s just woven into our sense of being “not good enough.”
LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: You’re Not a Victim What if life isn’t happening to me at all? This week I’m sitting with one of the most foundational sections of A Course in Miracles — Chapter 27, Section 7 — and walking us into a teaching that took me a few years of real willingness to fully accept. Why does almost every problem feel like something the world is doing to us? What’s the difference between responsibility and blame that most of us have never been taught? And what was the one tiny shift that helped me realize I’d never actually been a victim at all? This is part one of a two-episode arc. Listen with me on Episode 737.
If you’re carrying religious guilt – whether from how you were raised, from past lives spent in churches and orders, or from a wound you can’t quite name – join me for my Recovering from Religious Guilt Deep Dive Workshop This Saturday, May 16. God doesn’t punish us. We do. And we can stop. Let’s lay this down together. 
. Register at PowerofLoveMinistry.net/
