The Importance of Shame

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.  

"Oh Give Thanks To The Lord"

Oh, give thanks to the LORD for He is good, for His lovingkindness is everlasting. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom He has redeemed from the hand of the enemy say so.  Psalm 107:1, 2

You don’t have to hang around my friend, Dennis Jernigan, very long to realize that this is probably in his top ten of favorite Bible passages. So I wasn’t surprised when he gave us this passage as our homework two weeks ago.

Now, I will be the first to admit that when I think of an in-depth Bible study Psalms is one of the last books I turn to. I mean, after all, its songs, right? How much analysis does a song really need? Either it speaks truth or doesn’t, case closed. And these verses seem pretty straight forward to me. So with a barely suppressed eye-roll, I dove in – more out of obligation than enthusiasm.   

But guess what? It seems I had a thing or two to learn after all. (Don’t make me start naming names of people who need to stop being so smug. I can feel your smirks through the computer, and you don’t know it all either.)

First of all, we were asked to look up the writer and the circumstance that lead to the writing of this particular Psalm. Easy enough, right? Wrong. Unlike many of the Psalms there is no intro included for this one, and if you go to the popular commentary sites you are going to find something that has run amuck in Biblical scholarship – the attempt to suppress anything prophetic within the Scriptures. Most sites are going to tell you that this was written sometime after the return of Babylonian exiles to the land of Israel. However, there is a major flaw in this argument, and if you take the Bible as a reliable source of history you have to dismiss what all the cool kids are saying and go by what is in the Word.

Which leads us to 1 Chronicles 16. I won’t type it all out here, but if you go and read it yourself (which I always recommend) you will find that David has just recovered the Ark of the Covenant from the Philistines. The man is stoked. He is dancing in what is roughly the ancient equivalent of his tighty-whites, he has offered up sacrifices to God, and he is dishing up some sweet raisin cakes for the ladies. If this wasn’t enough, he decides that old tunes just aren’t going to cut it anymore and he commissions Asaph and his kinsmen to write up some new songs – the first of which is recorded right there in 1 Chronicles 16.

If you take some time and do some deep reading the first thing you are going to discover is this is a medley of Psalm 96, 105, 106, and 107. The Psalms and the passage from Chronicles share verses that are similar and some that are verbatim. Time and space prohibit me from going over them all, but let’s just look at one verse:

O, give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; for His lovingkindness is everlasting. 1 Chronicles 16:34

Ring a bell?

So why is this important? I am so glad you asked. The reason is that it shows us the magnitude and greatness of Scripture. This Psalm was written in celebration. The Ark of the Covenant was home! The importance of this cannot be overstated. God’s presence was manifest over the Ark as he led them through the wilderness, the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments were inside of it, Aaron’s rod, and a pot of manna – all the things that reminded them of God’s redeeming power demonstrated in the Exodus from Egypt and in the birth of their nation.

Yet, even as they sang these songs in the time of their joy, it would function as a prophetic word for the time to come. When Babylon swept in and stole, not only the Ark of the Covenant, but the people of the Covenant. God’s true treasure on this earth, and where he desires to be most manifest, in the hearts and lives of his people. It was in remembering God’s promises that the people found the courage and strength to keep going and to cling to their identity in a foreign land. They would sing these songs in their homes, over themselves, and each other reminding them of what God had done in the past and would do in the future.

For us there is an incredible lesson in this. As believers, we live in a land where we don’t belong. We may not even know what our true home looks like, we just know that it isn’t here. Everyone around us wants us to forget, to just give up and fit in. No more fights about abortion, homosexuality, and transgender bathrooms. No more squabbles over red cups, pagan holidays, and legalized marijuana. Life would be easier, simpler if we just forgot who we were and what we believe.

But to do that we would have to forget the God who redeems, the God who delivers, and the God who never forgot we are his. So how do we remember him? How do we remember who we are? We proclaim it, even when we can’t see it. We sing the songs of truth, of his promises fulfilled in the past with faith that we will see them in our future. We have been redeemed once as we stepped into relationship with him, and we will be redeemed again out of this exile in a strange land. So until then don’t stop singing, don’t let anyone steal the truth of your song, and sing for those who have yet to hear the music of his love so that they may know the truth.  

When Faith Is Offensive

*This was originally posted as response to friend who found my support and friendship with Dennis Jernigan to be offensive. Find a link to "Sing Over Me" the documentary film on Dennis' life below.

My beliefs on homosexual behavior have been labeled hurtful. I do not disagree that anytime the Bible runs against our basic human nature it hurts. It hurt me when I experienced conviction about my own behavior. So there is no argument to be had there from me, but there is a way to move beyond the hurt. And that is ultimately the message.

In my personal experience, my faith has been the reason why I have been able to step into situations where many of my friends have been hurting and respond with compassion to friends whose behavior is at odds with particular aspects of my faith.

As such, in more than one instance I have been the only one at the side of a friend grieving over a broken relationship. And the number of times it was a gay friend who wept because they had been betrayed is only slightly less than when I did the same for a straight friend.

I do this because pain is valid and real. We each deserve to have someone treat it seriously and with compassion. My faith gives me the tools to do so. If we are using our faith as justification to throw rocks at another then we cannot claim it as Christian, nor can we claim to be loving if we do not or cannot accept the love extended to us.

It is a bitter heart that cannot appreciate the motives even if the means offend. My motive is simple - I have experienced  freedom and joy by daily moving my life into deeper unity with God, and I hope that all those I encounter would know the same. If it is offensive to share the beauty I have found then I shall be offensive. To remain silent would be to deny the gift I have been given and passively endorse what I believe to be wrong as defined in the text of my faith.

I share Dennis Jernigan's story first because he is my friend and second because he has been a source of hope and encouragement for so many. To deny anyone access to the truth of his life would be a form of censorship that I impose on no one - including those I disagree with and whose views I believe are hurtful.

Dennis stands out in the fact he was changed. He flies in the face of conventional teaching, but not through statistical observation or abstract arguments. This is a truth he lives with grace and mercy. And I believe that each of us can experience profound changes with the compassion and help of a God who loves us enough to move in amazing ways.

Sing Over Me - A documentary about worship, identity, and the transformative power of the Gospel.