'Garden As Though You Will Live Forever."
Maybe you regularly view life through the lens of other people’s
expectations (real or imagined), and you’re beginning to buckle under the
pressure. Perhaps you feel self-conscious about not having a boyfriend or a
happy marriage when all of your friends seem content in their relationships.
Perhaps a friend betrayed you, one of your parents was
emotionally or physically absent, or your loved one has a secret addiction, and
you think it’s all somehow your fault. Maybe you’re stressed about your
children and how you handle things at home.
The voice in your head says, I’m
not a very good mother. Maybe you feel like a failure because life
got hard, and now your dreams seem out of reach, or you just don’t know who you
are anymore. Maybe you go through life with ever-present feelings of
inadequacy; you worry what other people would think if they knew the real you.
Shame lurks in all of these things. (I could go on, but at the risk of
depressing us all, I’ll stop there.)
In spite of the overwhelming nature of shame, there is good
news. The promise of Scripture is that when we look to God, He transforms our
shame into something beautiful — a sparkling, splendorous joy.
It may take time, and there may always be moments in life when
we experience shame, but when our identity is centered in Christ — not only
knowing who we are in Christ, but knowing who He is in us — we can discard the
dark covering of shame and rise in radiance. In other words, we may have shame,
but in Jesus, shame no longer has us.
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