New country
New culture
New language
New team to work with
New ministry
New pet monkey
New hair cut
New perception on a few things from my past.
Shame.
What a powerful word. A word that controlled so much of the first 23 years of my life. While I was in Volcan, Panama I was sitting with another girl, listening to her pour her heart out to God through playing guitar, and a few things hit me. There are two basic ways to deal with someone who is covered in shame, and both deal with shining light on the darkness.
The first resembles putting someone in an interrogation room- they’re stuck in an uncomfortable seat with no escape and they know they’re about to get into trouble. Basically you shine a spotlight on this person and expose all of their dirty dark spots and declare they are no longer allowed to live in those ways. You deal with everything in one quick, painful experience and get everything out on the table and the person promises to try their best to live a cleaner life. Unfortunately this experience is as painful as it sounds, and ends up just adding a lot of shame to the person- they already know they are wrong and dirty and instead of healing their wounds you cut the wounds out like a cancer and cauterize the holes, leaving a big ugly scar the person has to wear under their clothes forever. And every now and then they look back at that scar and remember their old ways and they crawl out of the spotlight into a dark corner and try to revisit their old life and live in the sin again. They know that what they are doing is wrong but they can’t resist the temptation to go back to what they have known for so long- they don’t want to regress, just take a little vacation to the good old days. But because the shame is still there, they are afraid to tell anyone what they are dealing with, so they get stuck- trapped, alone, shameful. I feel like this happens all too often in our Christian environments. Sin is treated shamefully, and we are too afraid to bring back into the light our darkness that we are supposed to have already dealt with and left behind when we became a Christian. So we just hide in dark corners when no one is looking and revisit old sins that chain us down- we want to escape, but we don’t know how… and Satan just whispers in our ear the whole time…. In the beginning he lures us in saying it won’t be that bad, that it isn’t that big of a deal, that we are strong enough to deal with it this time… and then once we get stuck in the darkness he just mocks us- telling us how stupid we were to ever go back there, how dare we call ourselves Christians, real Christians don’t live like this, they don’t go play in the dark.
So what is the other way?
Instead of a spotlight you use a candle. You light a small flame in a dark room and use the shame to fuel the flame until it burns up all of your shame and turns the darkness into light. This process is a lot slower and thus less appealing to our instant gratification culture- but the healing is worth it. As my dad told me a few weeks ago- “although it may be painful, most of the things that are worthwhile are not
Easy.”
Pictures by http://Krystlewilcox.theworldrace.org
(If this whole idea interests you check out The Bondage Breaker By Neil Anderson, it has been one of my favorite books I’ve read so far on The Race.)
