Yesterday, I shared an interview that Charisma Magazine did with my friend Dennis Jernigan. Not that I was too fond of the way Charisma decided to twist his words into a click bait headline, or that they did a pretty hard cut and paste of what Dennis said within the article itself, but rather because I know Dennis and I believe that there are people who need to hear his story.
As I expected, there was an immediate reaction, and most of it was negative. There were several comments, but most of them revolved around the concept of shame. The idea being that even in telling his story he was and is, and if I know Dennis, will continue to heap shame upon others by declaring his victory over homosexuality.
All of this got me to thinking, which is always dangerous, when did shame become a bad thing?
Seriously, why do we automatically reject anything to do with shame? I know that there are times when shame is unhealthy and damaging. I know that it is always painful and that it can drive people to do some really awful things in their lives, but does that mean that shame should be avoided at all costs?
There is a part of me that would love to think that shame is a horrible emotion that we should just outright rejected in our lives. I never liked being ashamed and shame was what kept me from seeking help when I was in the middle of an abusive marriage. The weight of it all left me self-destructive and suicidal, and I only learned how to speak up when I managed to free myself from those feelings. Part of what I do now is help other women to free themselves of the shame that has kept them quiet so that they can walk towards healing and with confidence of God’s love for them. There really would have never been any need for my book Scandalous if so many women had not been bullied into silence by the destructive power of shame. So, yeah, I am not a big fan of that particular emotion.
But there is another story, one that I haven’t told all that often – probably because I have been, well, ashamed.
Sometime after my divorce, I found someone who made me happy. There are no words to describe how complete I felt with this person or how they eased all the wounds I carried since leaving the warzone of my marriage, but there was one problem. This person was unwilling to commit to loving only me. I knew I could never be happy hanging out on the fringes of their life. I wanted to be the center of their world, just like they had become the center of mine. So I did everything in my power to facilitate that. I began bending and twisting the rules, reinterpreting the decrees of my faith to make allowances for my lust, and justifying my actions under the guise of love.
God is the God of love, I told myself, and so he must want this for me. God would never allow me to feel such passion for something he did not bless. He would have never created me this way if he knew it would cause me to sin in his eyes, so I must not be sinning to do what was so incredibly natural for me. This was his design, everyone knows this, and only a fool would say that it is evil to experience the bliss I felt only with this person.
Looking back, I can see the flaws in my logic. I know now that what comes natural to humanity is very often the very things that God does call sin. He has no use for my happiness when it comes at the expense of who he declared me to be, and his greatest desire is that I would love him above all others. If that means putting aside my own desires as a demonstration of that love, I need to do it, and if I am allowing my happiness to be pervert his word to serve me then I am declaring that my happiness, not God, is the one I am worshipping.
I won’t lie to you. It wasn’t easy turning loose. I can’t tell you how devastated I was when I finally walked away, and what was worse, I had no clue as to who or what I was walking towards. Sure, I knew I was chasing Father, but what that looked like this side of eternity, I didn’t know. And the idea of living my life alone terrified me as few other things ever had. I had become so enmeshed in my dream of being with this person and finding my fulfillment in a life with them that I did not even know how to define who I was or who I could be without them because every image of the future I possessed had them at my side.
How did I do it? How did I find the courage to finally make that cut? Well, it didn’t start out as courage. It started out as shame. Big, ugly, nauseating shame. The type of shame that makes you doubt if you are worthy of life. The type of shame that rubs salt into the wounds of loss by demanding that you admit how stupid you had been, how you had let yourself be played, and how you had sold out everything you believe to be true so that you could have a few moments of fun that left you utterly unfulfilled and tormented.
But shame becomes something amazing when presented to Father. Shame stops being that ugly worm that gnaws at your guts and finds wings as it transformed into repentance, and finds its true form in faith. I think this is the step so many of us are unwilling to take, and why shame paralyzes us or propels us to do horrible things to ourselves, we don’t trust the process of repentance. We buy into the lie that if our walk to Father begins in pain that it will continue in pain. So we recoil before he can lead us through the process. All we can focus on is what we are losing, and when we shift our gaze to him we see our sins laid bare before a God who loved us so much he withstood the shame of the cross on our behalf. Knowing that so much ugliness was heaped upon one so perfect makes your soul bleed. Everywhere we turn is nothing but pain! Giving up seems to be the only option where we don’t have to hurt.
Having faith means that we learn how to trust the process, and sometimes the process means embracing the pain. I think there is reason for this, and I don’t think it is because is some celestial sadist. I think he wants us to know the depth of the wounds we carry within us. I think he wants us to feel our sickness has invaded every part of our being and how it has warped us into something that he never desired us to be. I think he wants us to learn how to hate our sin, but more importantly, I think he wants us to know our sin does not define us. For how will we ever celebrate the grandeur of his love and forgiveness if we are unable to acknowledge the depths of the healing?
No, shame is not a bad thing. It is a necessary thing, but something should only last for season – a tool to be picked up and then cast aside as we celebrate God’s redeeming love that was given when we were still lost in our sin.
No comments:
Post a Comment