Overcoming Self-Hatred & Learning to Love

“He takes the broken places of us and He just mends them together. And He mends them together so perfectly that people that looked from the outside would say there was never a broken place there.”

Mar 12, 2025

Below is a snippet of a conversation with Malinda Dietrich, a 70-year-old woman of God who has been journeying with the Lord for 46 years. Malinda shares how the Lord took her from a hardened girl who used to tell others that God was just “a crutch” to a woman in love with Jesus. Malinda also discusses her struggles with identity, self-hatred, and shyness, and how the Lord has brought healing and restoration to those areas of her life. If you prefer listening, you can listen to or watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

What has your journey looked like?

Well, I have been walking with the Lord 46 years. So it's been a long and very good journey. It has been a journey. And I came to the Lord when I was 24. So that makes me 70. And the Lord revealed Himself to me. I was not looking for Him. He was looking for me. And I love that about Him.

You know that He wants to have relationship with us. As a matter of fact, I was the girl who actually would tell other people, you don't need Him, He’s a crutch. And I had known Him a little bit. I was acquainted with Him, I guess that's a good way to say it, as a child and felt His presence, which I could never get away from. And then as I got older, I went down a path of self-destruction, but I was not looking for Him whatsoever.

And I was 24 and I was in my car after a night of being out with a guy I was dating and partying, and I was high. And He came in and started talking to me. And when He did, I said, ‘You must have dialed the wrong number.’ I mean, that's literally what I said to Him, I said, ‘You must have dialed the wrong number. I'm not that girl. I'm not that Christian girl. I can't be that Christian girl. I'm not good. There's nothing good about me.’ I knew who I was. And I said, there's nothing good about me. I can't do that.

And so the next day I got up, I went about my business, didn't even think about it. This kind of blows my mind. I didn't even think, well, you were talking to God last night. But the next night, the same thing happened. I had the same response. The third night He came to me and I basically said, leave me alone. And something changed. I had been telling Him to go away and then I would get out of my car. That night I told Him to go away and His presence left. And when His presence left, it was such a marked difference that it was like someone slapped me in the face and sobered me up.

And I was like, two responses. I was so excited because I knew He was real. And I had reached the point in my life where I literally had this kind of metaphysical explanation of who God was and all of that. And I knew at that moment He was real. And that really excited me. But the second response was fear because being raised in the church, I had heard the sermon, well, He will only knock so many times and you have a free will. So it excited and scared me.

And so my mother was a believer and I went to her and I said, mom, I said, ‘Jesus was dealing with me and I told him, no, what do I do?’ And she could have led me to the Lord. She could have done this and God was like, ‘You're gonna fight for this now. You told me no long enough.’ And she goes, well, I guess you just have to seek Him now. And she turned and walked away. And I thought, what does that even mean? I've got to seek Him now?

So I was like, okay, I know, I'll go to her church because she had a church that always had an altar call in the end. And I thought, this will be easy, you know, I'll go. And so I went and it was the week before Christmas and they had a Christmas service. And I remember absolutely nothing about that service. All I remember thinking was, I'm doing this, I am doing this tonight because I was excited, but I also had a fear. And so when the service ended, they did not have an altar call. I'm like, you really are gonna make me fight for this! You're gonna make me step out. And so I had an umbrella, because it was raining and I was like, what am I supposed to do? And I'm fidgeting with my umbrella and my mother walks up and she said, Malinda, what are you doing?

And my mother was the most prim and proper Southern lady. And I looked at her and I said, ‘Mom, I'm not leaving this place till someone prays with me.’ And she goes, totally out of character, ‘Praise the Lord!’ And she goes running down the aisle. She got the pastor, he prayed with me and he said, ‘Now honey, the devil's gonna come and he's gonna tell you that this is not real.’

And I was like, okay, okay, I was listening and I knew I was different. I knew right away I was different. And I went home and I put my head on my pillow and it was the first time I ever remember having peace. And then the next morning I woke up and I had peace. And I was like, no devil could tell me that this isn't real. And it's been lasting peace.

What have you learned about God that you wish you’d known when you were younger?

I wish that I had known when I was younger His unconditional love, how great it is. I mean, it's unfathomable really. Just the fact that He would come after me and I didn't want anything to do with Him. And He’s like, no, no, no, I want to have that relationship with you. And I think that we have these lies about who He is and we fall for the lies of the enemy that tells us when we mess up, and we do, when we mess up that we need to hide from Him. You know, that's what Adam did in the garden.

And the prodigal son, I love that story because it's such a good picture of us and it's such a good picture of the Father. I mean, the son, he was like me. He just walked away from all things that were good and healthy and he ended up in a pig pen. And you know that he probably wanted to go home a lot sooner. He didn't want to be in a pig pen, but shame kept him there, and probably fear.

And he probably didn't believe that his father would embrace him. But the picture of the father is that he was waiting for him to come, longing for him to come. And when he came, he didn't just go, there he is, I knew he'd come back eventually. He ran to him, embraced him, covered him, threw a party for him. Yet the enemy always tries to convince us that the Father is not loving, that it's not unconditional love, and that we have to hide from Him.

And that's one of my heart cries that people will just know who He is because He’s nothing like most people think He is. He's good. And I mean, this is a God who wants to be with us. He’s not far away. Matter of fact, He wants to know us so much and have relationship with us so much that He became human and lived among us and suffered the things that we suffered, even worse things than we suffer, just so we could have relationship with him.

I mean, that is not a mean God. He’s like the father that says to the son, yeah, I know what you did. I know what you did, but come home. Let me clean you. Let me bind your wounds. Let me give you what I have.

What’s the most difficult challenge the Lord has brought you through?

Well, my biggest personal challenge has always been my flesh. I mean, I am definitely strong-willed and stubborn. And this is a misconception of people that don't know Him, they think that all Christians should be perfect. We're not little Jesuses when we become born again. We’re far from it. We're just broken people who are doing our best to follow the perfect One. You know, people will say, well, I would never be a Christian because of the way Christians do this or do that. We don't follow them. We follow Jesus. We don't follow people. We follow Jesus.

He's the perfect one and I by no means was perfect. When I was growing up, I was exposed to porn when I was in elementary school. The enemy just set me up. I was walking to school and found porn hidden under a plank that covered this little bitty ditch. And I was the one who took it home with me. I took it home, I looked at it, I studied it, and then the enemy set me up to where I found my father's porn.

No child should be exposed to that. And what it did to me was it messed with my identity and my relationship with my father. And I would think, does my father see women like that? Does he really look at them like that?

And so it really took me down a journey of self-hatred and feeling that I never measured up. So my biggest struggle was getting all of those things put back together. And when I came to the Lord at 24, He started that journey and He’s still working on me. I’ll still occasionally feel that I just don't measure up, but I catch it quickly. I'm like, no, not this time. And so I will catch it.

And then I went through a marriage. After I became born again, he and I both really loved Jesus. But he and I both were very broken people in need of Jesus to put us back together. And unfortunately, after 29 years, it ended in divorce. But we have four wonderful children together, and I wouldn't trade that for anything either. But through all those years, the Lord took me step by step by step by step and healed various parts of my identity. He takes the broken places of us and He just mends them together. And He mends them together so perfectly that people that looked from the outside would say there was never a broken place there.

And so through all of those things, I've learned to love. I've learned to love myself, which I had a tremendous amount of self-hatred. I've learned to love myself and I've learned to love others in a healthier way.

But through Him healing those, I still needed a foundation of how to respond in healthy ways. So one of the things that I did was I went through a Christian adult children of alcoholics class, a codependency class. And I remember, it was a Christian 12 step program basically. And I remember thinking, I said to the Lord, ‘You have taken everything out of me.’ I felt like He opened my head and just shook it all out and emptied it. And I said, I don't know what's normal anymore. I don't know what's a healthy way of thinking, but I trust you that you're just going to put it back together because I can't live like this. But I had given Him permission to do that.

We were new to Asheville and we were visiting churches. And one of the churches that we visited, the pastor was preaching a sermon on Stephen and he was talking about how Stephen stood before the people and before they stoned him he said, ‘Your fathers always stone the prophets. Your fathers before them stoned the prophets. But basically you have a choice today if you're going to make a right choice.’ And he said, that's how we live. You know, we have areas in us, we were raised in unhealthy patterns, or we were raised to believe this truth or this truth. And he said, God wants us to see things how He sees them. And so I said a prayer that day and I gave the Lord permission to just go in. I said, just open up like I was a chest of drawers, you know, just take each drawer, go in and clean it out, just toss out the things around healthy and put in the good stuff.

Other wise words worth echoing:

-“The Lord has given us tools that we can pick up, but we have to pick them up…that sword and fight and use the Word and it will cut through the demonic realm. It will cut through the very thoughts and motives and feelings that we have in our heart, it will cut through those things.”

-“Do not be afraid to do the things that God has called you to do. I've had situations where I had sweaty palms, but do it anyway. Sometimes you have to step into what the Lord's called you to do. You step into it with fear and you might not feel adequate. That's not a bad thing if you don't feel adequate because He’s the one. We want to be humble and go low and let Him go high.”

- “Don't model yourself after any man. Follow Him. People will let you down. Follow Jesus.”

- “We want to be humble and go low and let Him go high.”

Listen to or watch the full conversation on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Thank you for being here,

Katharine

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