“I will not send you back,” the social worker told her newly adopted son Taylor.

Social worker Connie Going from Florida had placed over 1,000 Tampa Bay-area foster kids with adoptive parents when Taylor came along. Taylor and his siblings were thrown into the foster care system in 2003 because his drug-addicted parents neglected them. Taylor and his siblings were adopted, but Taylor’s anger issues caused the adoptive families to send him back to the children’s homes. 

After the second time he was sent back, 10-year-old Taylor broke his social worker Connie’s heart. “All I could think about was how he was feeling and how he was blaming himself again,” she says.

The next day she made arrangements to drop him as a client and take him on as a son. She had looked all over for somebody to parent him. “And it was me,” she says. Connie decided to become his mom instead of his social worker.

In one of his angry moments after he began living with her, he decided to run away. As he was going out the door, Connie told him, “Taylor, I am not going to send you back.” He realized he had found someone who would love him through the good times and the bad. Someone who would not send him packing. “Yeah, this is where I belong,” Taylor says. “She knows my worst side and she still cares about me and still loves me.”

Like Taylor, I grew up in the foster system, living in eight different homes and two children’s homes. I too felt that it was my fault whenever I was sent back. Like Taylor, if it got too hard, the foster family would send me packing, because I wasn’t really theirs.

Taylor’s story and my own experience reminded of our relationship with God. For many different reasons we can have insecurities about our relationship with God.

We sometimes feel like if we mess up, God is done with us. But that is just not the case. No matter what you have done, no matter what sin you may commit, God will never give up on you! Never! You can choose to leave God, but He will never leave you! He is invested in you! He will keep His promises to you. 

Paul wrote it beautifully when he wrote in Romans 8:38-39,

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So if you fall, if you mess up, or you feel you are not worthy of love, get back up. Know that God is there to give you comfort, to love you, to encourage you forward. He understands you and is invested in you. He knows the good, the bad and the ugly—and He still loves you.

God will not send you back when you mess up! Because you are not His foster child—you are His adopted child.

Read the original story of Taylor by Steve Hartman on CBS on Dec. 27, 2013.