Shame Interrupted

Every few years I reread Ed Welch’s book Shame Interrupted. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the feeling of never measuring up, which started early in life. This poem was the result of my ponderings.

***

The voices in my head tell me I don’t belong,
I’m not wanted,
     not welcome,
           not good enough.
I don’t look right,
     act right,
          feel right,
                talk right.
I still hear the whispers behind my back,
Taunts and jibes,
     trying to provoke a reaction.
I won’t let them know how it hurts,
     keep my head down,
Pretend I don’t hear them, I don’t care.
One day soon I’ll leave them behind,
     go to better places.

But the voices still follow me, still echo in my head.
I wasn’t invited,
      I’m not wanted,
             they don’t care.
There is One Voice I trust, One who never fails,
One Who says,
      “I hear,
             I know,
                   I love you.”
He too experienced shame,
Crucified, naked, taunted,
     “If you are the Christ!”
              “Save yourself!”
He endured the cross, despising the shame,
For us, for me.

There are some who speak His words,
     but they too forget,
They don’t hear the voices in my head.
They are dealing with voices of their own.
But God remains,
     interrupting shame,
Reminding me,
       “You are My beloved child.”

“Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood,
Sealed my pardon with His blood,
      Hallelujah, what a Savior!”

“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom. 8:15).

© 2024 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Even Me

I wonder if you have the same reaction to this passage that I sometimes do?

“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men... Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:23, 36).

Isn’t it tempting to think, “Yes, Peter! Stick it to those unbelieving Jews and Romans who killed Jesus!”? And yet, if it weren’t for my sin (and yours) Jesus would not have had to die. “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). And “For our sake [God] made [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). That realization shouldn’t lead to pride in my accomplishments or disdain for unbelievers. It should lead to humble gratitude for the eternal life we have received by the grace and mercy of God. “[He] was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).

On prideful days, I can be like the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11), when I should be praying, “Thank You for being merciful to me, a sinner!”

Some days I identify more with Paul’s proclamation, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:15-16). Paul knew what he was talking about, although I think we are each the “foremost of sinners.” Any sin against the perfectly holy and righteous God is worthy of eternal damnation. Whether our personal sin debt was a penny or a thousand dollars, it required the life of the perfect sacrifice, Jesus Christ, to redeem us.

As we come to Good Friday and Easter, let us not forget that we aren’t invited into God’s family because we’re so great and have so much to offer Him. We are here only because He first loved us and chose to ransom us by death and resurrection of Christ. “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

“The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging Him on a tree. God exalted Him at His right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins” (Acts 5:30-31). “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17).

© 2024 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

From Beginning to End

Psalm 71 gives a lifelong perspective on faith.

“Upon You have I leaned from before my birth” (6a). “For You, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth” (5). “Do not cast me off in the time of old age” (9a). “O God, from my youth You have taught me, and I still proclaim Your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me” (17-18a).

That first quote in particular caught my attention— “from before my birth.” No matter how young you are when you come to faith in Christ, none of us can claim to have been Christians from birth. And yet, when you do meet God and grow in faith, you start to realize that He has been at work long before you knew it. As David wrote in Psalm 139, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (16). And the Apostle Paul proclaimed to the Ephesian church, that God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (1:4). You might say that from God’s perspective, the saved have always been saved, even though they have not always known it. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce:

“[B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all this earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory... the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly” (ch. 9).

Whether or not you agree completely with Lewis’s eschatology, there is great comfort to be found in believing that God is sovereign over every day and every detail of your life. The God who created us and brought salvation to us will also sustain us to the end, and then He will also raise us to eternal life in the new creation. “From the depths of the earth You will bring me up again” (20). He will never forsake us, so we can trust Him to old age and gray hairs. With that assurance, “I will hope continually and will praise You yet more and more” (14). No matter how far along the path of life you may be, we can be witnesses to others of God’s faithfulness. “My mouth will tell of Your righteous acts, of Your deeds of salvation all the day... I will remind them of Your righteousness, Yours alone” (15-16).

May we endeavor to be faithful to that high calling.

“So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me until I proclaim Your might to another generation, Your power to all those to come” (18).

© 2024 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Look at Me

David Brooks writes in How to Know a Person,

“Apparently we live in a society in which people don’t get to tell their stories. We work and live around people for years without ever knowing their tales. How did it come to be this way? …We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal. If you give people a little nudge, they will share their life stories with enthusiasm… people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen.”

We’ve all heard little children demanding, “Look at me! Look at me!” Somewhere along the way we stop may asking for attention, but we never stop needing it. And for many people, an obsession with the screens in front of us leads us to stop offering attention to others. Brooks writes,

“The question everybody is unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: ‘Am I a person to you? Do you care about me? Am I a priority for you?’”

All too often, even in the church and Christian organizations, it feels like the answer is No. The isolation of the pandemic accelerated our loss of social skills, including non-verbal communication, but this isn’t exactly a new problem. More than once in Scripture God made Himself known to those who felt invisible, such as Joseph, Moses, and Hannah. God spoke to Hagar in the wilderness, leading her to proclaim, “You are a God of seeing… Truly here I have seen Him who looks after me” (Gen. 16:13). Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, and she told her neighbors, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did” (John 4:29). In the book of Acts, Peter and John saw a lame man and Peter said, “Look at us,” and then proceeded to heal the man. Truly seeing the man and his need resulted in a gift far greater than merely giving him alms.

The book of Proverbs has much to say about friendship and our words, such as:

• “A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends” (16:28).
• “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (17:17).
• “He who loves purity of heart, and whose speech is gracious, will have the king as his friend” (22:11).
• “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (27:6).
• “Oil and perfume make the heart glad, and the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest council” (27:9).

Brooks notes that many people think they are better conversationalists than they really are. And many more feel inadequate in conversation. While we can learn from books and blogs, perhaps the best teacher is experience. If we are more intentional in engaging in conversations and asking questions, we can learn a lot from one another.

May we be those who seek to let others know that they are seen and heard, and that they are loved by God and by us.

“Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body” (Prov. 16:24).

Related resources:

Gavin Ortlund teaching on good listening

Russell Moore interviews David Brooks

Russell Moore and Andy Crouch on tech obsession

© 2024 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.