Stepping into Europe my first thought definitely was not God is going to teach me what it means to not have shame in my life. It was more along the lines of Whoa! Coffee! Cute shoes! New language!. I’ve only been here for a week and all of my thoughts have been dancing around this huge bon fire being fueled by fears of not doing well in college, being an annoyance, not being loved by someone special, and of being forgotten. All of that growing bigger from the driftwood called “shame” that I constantly toss in.
I’m warmed by it.
My mind says:
That wasn’t good enough. You’re too dumb for this. You’re never going to be capable. What makes you think…too ugly…too fat…too much baggage. Shut your mouth. You’re not valuable to this team. If you don’t go to college then you are nothing. They are going to forget you. The things you want to do in life don’t make sense and aren’t going to happen…
Tonight my friend, Melissa Lowell, read me an excerpt from Stuff Christians Like by Jonathan Acuff. It’s a fabulous book filled with witty, sarcastic humor about, well, things Christians like. And near the end he stops and tells a story about his five-year-old daughter and her first understanding of shame. She had scraped her head and when he went to put the band-aid on her forehead she expressed how she thought she would look silly with it there. She didn’t want it there because she was afraid of what others would think. And he wanted to ask her “Who told you that you were silly?”. Who had put the idea that she would look silly with the band-aid on her head? What had convinced her that it was not okay to look that way? That it was shameful…
He then goes on to explain how God has asked us a similar question. In Genesis 3:11 God asks us “Who told you that you were naked?”
Who told me I was ugly? That I was dumb? Who told me that I wasn’t enough or that I wasn’t loved? That my aspirations are silly and that someday my greatest friends will forget me? No one has. And God has told me the opposite. So where is this shame rooted? Where is it coming from?
I’ll leave you with a bit more from Acuff’s book:
“…God is still asking the same question, “Who told you that you were naked?”
And He is still asking us that question because we are not.
In Christ we are not worthless.
In Christ we are not hopeless.
In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.
In Christ we are not naked.
In Isaiah 61:10 it says, “For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.”
The world may try to tell you a thousand different things today. You might close this book and hear a million declarations of what you are or who you’ll always be, but know this.
…You are not naked.”
