WASHINGTON, D.C. (Catholic Online) - Do you ever feel as though you're climbing an enormous mountain of rock, and there's a particular ledge you just cannot surmount?  You claw your way up the steep face but can never pull yourself all the way up to the top.  You slide down, again and again, and land on your rump in a heap, discouraged to the point of despair.  This rock face may be a particular wound in your heart or a stumbling block in your faith that you can't seem to get past.  Anybody out there relate to this?

There's a certain rock face that I have struggled to climb all my life; that is, until now.  This Eastertide the Lord has answered my deepest, heartfelt cry and I cannot help but share it with you.  Not so that you'll be amazed or burst into applause, but that you might be encouraged not to give up.

I do not know when, where, or how it became part of me, but from a very young age, I have carried a yoke of rejection and disfavor.  I've worn it like an invisible scarlet letter on my chest, like a secret between me and God.  Despite an aching desire to please the Lord, to serve Him, to follow Him and be like Him, there was ever-present in my deepest heart a nagging voice that said, "You're a disappointment to Him.  You can tag along if you like, but you're nothing special.  He'll probably never notice you."

None of the usual suspects are to blame -   I had loving, attentive and holy parents and a happy family.  I was raised in the Church and I knew that Jesus died for my sins that I might be saved for eternity.  I was never harmed by anyone.  Yet this heartache never really left me, and I can't count how many times I  cried rivers of tears as I begged Jesus to love me as I loved Him.  A corner of my heart seemed always fractured by this shaming belief that I was a disappointment to God.

My head knew that Jesus did love me; my heart and soul were never truly convinced.  I lived with this bizarre dichotomy inside - part of me knowing the truth and part of me doing continuous battle with that nagging doubt, that despairing voice that kept me bound by fear and a belief that I was inadequate, unworthy, and undesirable. 

So great was my frustration with my fractured heart that I finally cried (literally) to Jesus and said, "Forget about healing my heart.  It's too pitiful.  Just rip it out and give me Yours instead."  (Perhaps the best prayer I've ever prayed!)  In His perfect wisdom, He began showing me that what had started as insecurity had morphed into a habit of self-pity and self-loathing.  He gently revealed that I was eating the strange fruit of pride.  This "Oh woe is me, Jesus doesn't love me!" stuff is a beguiling impostor of lowliness!  How is it possible that pride and feelings of worthlessness can go hand in hand?  But they often do... and in me, they were two sides of the same coin.

Thanks be to God for His great mercy that allowed me to finally recognize this in myself.   Without realizing it, I'd taken the long road trip from a little girl who wasn't really sure what made her special to a grown woman who'd decided she was only special because she was the one soul on earth whom Jesus could never really love.

Somewhere along the way my sincere pleas for Jesus' love warped into a blasphemy I wasn't even consciously aware of.  I was calling Jesus a liar.  I was saying His heart had room for everyone but me.  I was saying the blood He shed washed everyone clean but me.  I was "special" in my unworthiness.  I required more than every other soul on earth.  Pretty arrogant, eh?  Pride is a clever chameleon.

Yet He, with perfect irony and poetry, stooped low enough to show me how great a price He paid for my sinful, pitiful heart.  He who owed me nothing at all, who had nothing to prove, patiently and gently proved to me that He rescued me from hell for the sake of pure love.  Endless, unfathomable love... poured out on me, His beloved daughter.

His severe mercy that plunged me into a brutally honest evaluation of myself had brought me so much healing and restoration.  Little did I know that on Good Friday He would blow away the last remaining bits of debris and plant confidence in place of doubt.

I sat and watched "The Passion of the Christ" alone in my living room just before midnight.  I'd never seen the movie before and I could barely make it through the brutality.  The scourging was the worst part.  I cried out loud to my television, "Stop it!  Stop it!  Leave Him alone!"  Say what you will about artistic license and whether it really was as bloody, violent and merciless as it was portrayed, but for my money, it rang true.  I ...