Somehow, it is February, and I’m already a month behind in my 2021 goal to spend time with a weekly writing prompt. However, here is perhaps the most significant change I have identified in myself from the last year: I am far less liable to let shame control me.
Shame is sneaky, it’s slippery. It whispers our deepest insecurities in our ears and teaches us to tuck ourselves away from others— or really from anything fearful, anything that might require vulnerability or courage. For so long, I allowed shame to keep its claws in me. It was the dominant voice in my head. It was the lens through which I viewed myself and my relationship to the world around me. It crowded out grace, left no room for belovedness.
Perhaps we don’t all need to learn this way, but I had to plumb the depths of shame before I was able to see how it was hurting me (a story I tell here). In that place, I had no veneer of goodness to offer. I couldn’t hide, had no energy to perform or pretend. I was entirely exposed before God, and to my surprise, he did not leave. Instead, He was faithful to meet me at the bottom, and it was there that I began to understand what it was to simply receive unmerited grace, unconditional love.
As I learned to trust that the love Jesus held out to me was perfect and forever, he began to undo this stranglehold of shame, slowly unwinding it in his mercy and kindness. As a result, I have known a new kind of freedom in the last year. I’m free to try and fail and try again. I don't fear vulnerability like I used to. I can receive criticism without being crushed by it. And I’m learning to take small steps of courage, to not be afraid of my own voice.
All of this is grace.
"But God loves who we really are— whether we like it or not. God calls us, as he did Adam, to come out of hiding. No amount of spiritual makeup can render us more presentable to him... His love, which called us into existence, calls us to come out of self-hatred and step into His truth.
'Come to me now,' Jesus says. 'Acknowledge and accept who I want to be for you: a Savior of boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs. Quit projecting onto Me your own feelings about yourself. At this moment your life is a bruised reed, and I will not crush it; a smoldering wick, and I will not quench it. You are in a safe place." - Brennan Manning, Abba's Child
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