I’ve been terribly depressed. Tonight, I can’t get any sleep. I’m almost convinced God hates me and prefers my sister and brother, hence why their lives are better than mine. I feel like I’m not worth anything and I deserve all the bad I’ve gone through. Why did He create me? Nothing is changing even when I “surrender”. I’m so tired.
Not being certain what your experience of bad things is - I hope that you can lay hold of one thing at least.
When I was sixteen I tried to commit suicide. I was clearly unhappy - but I don't believe that I was depressed in any clinical sense of the term. My unhappiness stemmed from having gone through a terrible childhood at the hands of my mother which eventually led to being put into local authority care. When I was preparing for the time I would be going into the residential special school and away from my family - my mother sat me in the middle of my siblings and explained to them what would happen to them if they were like me.
When I arrived at the special school I remember being in my dormitory and looking out of the window as my parents were saying goodbye to the head master - and then watched them leave and walk away. I felt a terrible sadness even though I also knew just how much abuse my mother had put me through.
The difficulty with our experiences in life can often stem from being singled out by those who have charge over us and sometimes believing that we have been singled out as well - whether we have done anything wrong or not. You have made that meaning by speaking about being almost convinced that God hates you - and you have measured the evidence of that by speaking about your siblings as having better lives. So you speak of being baptised and surrendering to God as a seeming way of explaining why being almost convinced that God hates you is a valid thing to believe.
When I left residential care after seven years of being in care - my first contact with an independent life was almost my last experience of life - because as I say I tried to commit suicide. No one rescued me and I swallowed enough pills to deck a horse. Yet I sleep for three days and awoke completely unharmed. So I had no choice but to get on with life. For the following seven years until I was twenty four years old I was sent to prison five times - and served nearly five years in prison during that period of time. Then on the. 10th May 1984 I was converted to a living faith whilst in solitary confinement. No one was present - just myself and the Father.
So I asked the Father why He had allowed me to experience such a tumultuous life if He could have just revealed Himself to me as He had done in that cell. The Father told me in my spirit that He wanted me the way I was. And I knew immediately that my asking was based on what I had done to others in the seven years after I attempted suicide - and His answer spoke to my childhood.
It cannot be possible that God would want us to have harmed anyone - and yet He did permit my mother to harm me. It was that answer of the Father that set me onto a few weeks of extraordinary revelations by reading the Scripture and praying and simply abiding in the presence of God - all alone with God. I looked one time in such a state of mind at the steel door and the bars on the windows and realised that I was free for the first time in my entire life. I wrote my mother and told her about Christ. I wrote to one of my victims and asked for his forgiveness. I spent every hour of the waking day simply learning how it is that when we are under authority of our parents, of the policeman, of the teacher and of the Judge - they may all make terrible mistakes and they may do truly harmful and terrible things. But God never makes mistakes.
I learned in that cell to reflect on the numerous times the Father had sustained me as a child - how He had spoken to me when I was in tears and filled with utter confusion because of the failure of others who had authority over me when I was a child. And by the end of it I knew that the Father loved me and knew me from my mothers womb and gave His Son for my own sin and for theirs. I saw for the first time that there had been righteous men and women in my life - and whilst they had been silent to me - they were not silent to God. But I also remembered the express times that the Father had moved in my life by His Spirit and called out my name so that I could not in the end turn away from Him so far - that there would be no way to find a way back.
Well dear sister before the Father saved me I was so angry with Him because of my awful childhood and the abuse I then endured in care (sexual abuse) that I openly went into the occult and formulated an occult theosophic manuscript to form an occult oder when I was released from prison on my last sentence. The most extraordinary thing about the Father is that He sets into our lives from every part of our childhood years the means to shake our fist at Him - because He knows that if we don't do that - then we will destroy others simply to satiate that anger. I hadn't realised that I had been angry with God until I realised that I had harmed others. Shake your first at God sister and let the Father answer you in Christ. You can't harm God. Tell Him what He has permitted to happen in your life. The Lord be with you and enrich your heart and mind with His great mercy and love in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Your brother in Him.