IMO: You Don’t Have What it Takes - Tuesday
2 Corinthians 7:10
For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death. (NLT)
“Ready or not… here I come!” The game is on. The slow, methodical count to twenty is over. The warning has been given. Those who have found their hiding place now stand motionless, their shallow breathing bringing an eerie quiet along. Someone is searching for them. And winning at a backyard game of hide-and-seek means to avoid detection.
Doesn’t it seem, at times, that we never stopped playing the game? Something within us makes us run from being revealed. We have the innate sense that to be uncovered, to be exposed is a source of defeat and, like Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, is cause for an extreme, almost instinctive sense of shame. And so we run from discovery. We flee from disclosure. To be discovered is to have our hearts laid bare and to risk judgment, or worse… to be cast out, relegated to the reject pile.
It’s a self-reinforcing loop. We keep our heads down to evade capture, then we wonder why we feel all alone. We seek out remote places both physically and emotionally that will provide us with the cover that we crave, then throw a pity party because no one notices or cares. We isolate ourselves to keep distant from feelings of shame that expose our dire need, our sense of deficiency. Maybe that’s why, among the synonyms for shame, we find the way littered with words like embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace. Each speaks to the ugliness of shame.
But one word captures the blackened, repulsive heart of shame: mortified. Originating in the Latin word mortificare, meaning “to kill,” this word gives a full sense of what shame means, how it feels, and why it causes people to flee into their deepest, darkest, most secretive hiding places. And these isolated hiding places contain almost equally undesirable feelings: loneliness, disconnection, and detachment.
Shame and isolation—do we have to make a choice between the lesser of these two evils? No. You see, both shame and isolation are symptoms that can be eliminated when the root cause is treated. Just as we seek the care of a physician for a serious wound, there is Someone we can go to who will show us the way into the light in order to have the darkness of both shame and isolation dispelled: His name is Jesus. Bring your life, as it is, to Him. Let Him bring what’s hidden into the light so you can experience His healing and grace-filled forgiveness.
Tuesday’s Reflection
Pastor Eugene Peterson reminds us, “Shaming the outcast is not gospel work. Forgiving sin is gospel work.” When we encounter Jesus in the pages of scripture, through His people, or in any other way He reveals Himself, we catch a glimpse of God’s grace-filled, forgiving heart. He offers the remedy even as we reveal our sickness.
