[More on Training camp to follow]
I am sitting here in the local coffee shop with my Chai tea latte (‘India day’ at training camp anybody?!) as I try to process what happened at training camp. I find it hard to even put into words all that the Lord began to do in my life and my heart. It was a heavy week, as we were walked into the deepest and most painful parts of our hearts. Not only were we taken to those dark places, but we were then asked to share with people we just met about those dark places. But through the heaviness, the Lord was allowed to lift our load and walk us into freedom.
Not going to lie, I was nervous going into training camp. Not about sleeping in a tent, weird food or bucket showers; instead, I was nervous about having to spill the dark parts of my heart I keep locked away. I am an emotional person. I allow myself to feel things…to an extent. I feel things only until it becomes too painful, and then I lock it up. I have gotten too good at compartmentalizing my pain. I don’t have time to think about it or work through it, so I’m just not going to right now. The problem with that is, I never set aside time to actually process those things.
During training camp, the guys went on a 20 mile “man hike” on the Appalachian Trail. While they were gone, we had a girl’s retreat. These two days brought a tremendous amount of freedom into my life. The speakers walked us through the difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt–> feeling responsibility or remorse for a crime or wrongdoing. This is a spiritual function used to get us to the Father for reconciliation.
Shame–> the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance or belonging; used to isolate and disconnect us from the Father.
The Lord spoke right to my heart. He gave me a vision of myself. We are standing in a room together, but I am hiding. He walks over to where I am hiding and stretches out his hand saying to me, “Why are you hiding from me? I see you for who you are, not the choices you have made. I have already forgiven you. Now you just need to forgive yourself.”
That night, we were broken into groups of six to share with each other what we were processing. This was it. The moment I had been dreading…I’m going to have to share the things I have been trying to hide that have caused shame in my life. My heart is pounding, and I feel sick. As the girls in my group began to share, I just began to weep. Not because I was upset, but because they were saying things that I was thinking. For the first time, I wasn’t isolated in my shame; instead, I was walking alongside people struggling with the same thing.
Freedom.
This is what the Lord gave me that night. It was painful, and I felt like the Lord was ripping the shame out from the depth of my heart. He was removing things in me that I didn’t know how to remove myself. But through the hurt, he said to me “be free.”
You are free to be who you were created to be. There is power in bringing our stories into the light. It is there that the Lord can work to redeem them. I am no longer going to carry shame, because it doesn’t change the way God views me.
