There is a particular arithmetic that people run in the dark. You count the times you meant it. You count the times you swore this was the last time, and then it was not. Somewhere in that counting a quiet verdict forms: you have used up your allowance. You imagine a ledger with a limit, and you assume you crossed it long ago.
Almost everyone who returns to God carries this fear in some form. The addict who relapsed again. The person who prayed for a month and then let it slide. The one who keeps confessing the same wound to the same silence. If that is you tonight, read slowly. The Qur'an treats you with more patience than you have shown yourself.
Start where God starts. "Say: O My servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of the mercy of God. Indeed, God forgives all sins" (the Qur'an, 39:53). Sit with the address before the promise. God does not say O you righteous ones. He calls the very people who wronged themselves, the ones sure they have gone too far, and He calls them My servants still. The relationship survives the failure.
Notice also the word all. The verse covers every category of wrong, whether large or small, whether first or hundredth. It leaves you no honest room to argue that yours is the exception. The despair you feel is real, and the Qur'an still names it as a temptation to resist rather than a fact to accept.
We speak of a "second chance" as if it were a rare mercy grudgingly given. The Qur'an describes something steadier than that. God says of those who turn back after wrong: "And who forgives sins except God? And they do not persist in what they have done while they know" (the Qur'an, 3:135). The word here is persist. The failing is assumed. Human beings slip, remember, and turn. What God asks is that you refuse to settle into the sin as though it were home.
This is why returning is built into daily life, and it is not saved for a final reckoning. "Establish prayer at the two ends of the day and in the early hours of the night. Indeed, good deeds drive away bad deeds" (the Qur'an, 11:114). The rhythm of the day itself is a set of open doors. You earn one entry and then keep walking back in, day after day.
Here is the part that undoes the ledger entirely. God does more than erase the wrong. He says of the one who repents and believes and does righteous work that "God will replace their evil deeds with good ones, and God is Forgiving and Merciful" (the Qur'an, 25:70). The bad marks are wiped, and something new is written in their place.
Think about what that means for the person doing 2 a.m. arithmetic. Your worst chapters, honestly grieved and turned away from, do not remain a debt against you. In the hands of a merciful God they become part of the story of your return. The one who could not stop, then finally did, understands mercy in a way the untested never will.
The Qur'an even names the kind of turning it hopes for: "O you who believe, repent to God with sincere repentance" (the Qur'an, 66:8). It asks for sincerity, and it allows for imperfection. Sincerity is honesty about where you are and a genuine wish to be elsewhere. It does not require a guarantee that you will never fall again. It requires that, in this moment, you mean it.
The hardest case is not the first sin. It is the repetition, the shame of standing in the same spot you swore you had left. This is where people quietly give up. Shame convinces them they no longer deserve to keep asking, and so they stop asking altogether.
The Qur'an answers this directly. "It is He who accepts repentance from His servants and pardons misdeeds, and He knows what you do" (the Qur'an, 42:25). The verb is present and ongoing. God accepts repentance as a continuing act, and it never expires after your patience with yourself runs out. He knows exactly what you did, and the invitation still stands. His knowledge of your record and His willingness to receive you exist in the same breath.
So the honest answer to your question is this. No counter tracks how many times you may return. The limit you fear is one you built, and God never set it. The door you assume is locked is the one He describes as open to those who knock. Your lifetime runs out one day, and mercy does not, and while the lifetime lasts the invitation lasts with it.
If tonight you can manage nothing more than a whispered I keep failing and I still want You, that is a return, and the Qur'an calls it enough to begin. You do not have to arrive clean. You have to turn toward the One who cleans.
Sit with 39:53 until the word all stops feeling like it excludes you. When you are ready, read slowly through the verses on repentance and the verses on mercy and forgiveness, and let them count for you what you have been miscounting alone. The ledger you feared was never the real record. Come back. Then, when you slip, come back again.