Allah does not just forgive the sin. He CONVERTS it. Yubaddilu: He replaces. The sin you wept over becomes a good deed in your column.

There is a teaching from Ibn al-Qayyim that should sit with every believer. He writes: the believer who, before his sin, was distant from Allah, and after his sin and tawbah came running to Him, the sin was the cause of his nearness. Such a sin Allah loves more than a hundred shallow good deeds, because it produced the relationship. He cites the verse 25:70: yubaddilu Allāhu sayyiʾātihim ḥasanāt. The conversion is not arbitrary; it is the recognition that the sin became the soil from which the tawbah grew. The bad deed was the seed of the good deed that followed. Allah converts the seed into the fruit. So tonight, look at your past with new eyes. The sins you most regret may be, by Allah's mercy, the very materials of your salvation. Not because the sins were good; they were not. But because they drove you to Him, and the driving was their conversion. Make the tawbah. Believe. Do the righteous deed. Watch the verse activate. Yā Allāh, You who convert what is bad into what is good, accept our tawbah and convert our ledger. Take our worst moments and make them, by Your mercy, the reasons we entered Your Paradise. Āmīn.