The Story Behind "Tov Me'od (Very Good)"

For most of my life, shame ran everything.

Not guilt over something I had done. Guilt says you made a mistake. Shame is heavier than that. Shame says the mistake is you. It sat under everything I did and everything I was, this quiet, constant verdict that I was bad at the core. Unworthy. Not good enough, and never going to be. I believed it so completely, for so long, that it stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like the truth about me.

I knew scripture. I could recite the parts about being made with intention, made with love. But there is a difference between knowing a thing and believing it about yourself, and I lived in that gap for thirty-nine years. The worth was real for everyone else. Never for me.

The change came from one verse. In Genesis, God finishes creating, looks at all of it, and calls it very good. In Hebrew, that is "tov me'od." I had read it a hundred times. Then one day it finally landed. I was not the exception. I was inside that verdict too. My worth was never something I had to earn, or perform, or shame myself into deserving. It was decided the moment I was made, and nothing I believed about myself in the dark had ever changed it.

That is what this song holds. I wrote it as a slow delta blues because I wanted it to sound like the truth arriving quietly, the way it actually did. It starts unsure and heavy, because shame is heavy. Then it steadies. Each chorus lands like the thing I needed someone to say to me for most of my life. You are good. You always were.

If shame has been running your life too, telling you that you are the one person who does not get to be worth anything, I made this for you. It took me a long time to hear it. I hope it reaches you sooner than it reached me.

Tov me'od. Very good.