How do we listen to and distinguish which shame is telling the truth?
Shame tackles and trips estranged parents from every direction. Sometimes, it ducks in and out of the shadows, whispers poison, sours our food, and steals our favorite candy. Other times, it whispers tiny lie after tiny lie until we lose track of the truth. Shame always waits for the wrong moment to burst onto the scene and change the entire plot. If that wasn’t scary enough, three different kinds of shame divebomb us like laser-guided missiles headed straight for our souls: toxic shame, godly shame, and cultural shame.
Cultural Shame
Cultural shame drags like a strip of toilet paper stuck to our shoes at a black-tie event. Cultural shame bleeds through our social media feeds whenever someone offers a hot take on a favorite restaurant or criticizes our must-watch TV shows. Our cultural shame whines, “Something is wrong with me because the things I am passionate about are hated by others. That means, I’m not accepted.” Related to estrangement, every time we are asked about our children, we see the mix of pity and fear in the eyes of the askers, as if they will catch the disease if they stand too close to us.
But we believe what they believe anyway.
Toxic Shame
Toxic shame transforms, when we least expect it, from a ladybug into a giant alien witch that seeks to remove our hearts and lungs with one flick of her wand. Related to estrangement, all of us blew it at some level with our children because we are human. Some among us perpetrated lasting harm against our beloved strangers. Our journey toward reconciliation will require us to—in humility—measure it, weigh it, and determine the sheer tonnage of it. When we call ourselves names, beat ourselves up, run away, freeze, or imagine the George Bailey of it all, toxic shame screams, “You are worthless, broken, and busted. You’re not worth the air you breathe.” And that’s before shame starts cussing. Yes, toxic shame sounds like the voice and vocabulary of the enemy of our souls.
But we beat ourselves up anyway.
Godly Shame
Godly shame is not an oxymoron. Call it conviction, because that is what it is. We feel it when a server gives us too much change and we, for a nanosecond, imagine how we’d spend it until the Holy Spirit clears His throat. He instructs with an even tone, “Don’t do that. Remember who God created you to be.” We know we’re not perfect. We know we made mistakes. We believe those mistakes drove us to depend upon God Almighty for the care and keeping of our children. We acknowledged our stewardship of His children.
We should feel the weight of this conviction.
In our daily lives, we often can’t tell which shame is making our stomachs do more flips than Simone Biles and Mary Lou Retton combined. And that right there, friends, is what makes being an estranged parent so difficult. All three types of shame spoon us in bed, ride shotgun on our morning commute, and hand us our soap in the shower. We must learn to diagnose and process our shame. We will not be prepared for a text exchange with our beloved strangers—let alone reconciliation—without being able to distinguish among the types of shame and respond well. Too many of us, for example, may confuse toxic shame with godly shame. That’s too easy because they may be communicating the same message in different ways. We can’t distinguish between the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the condemnation of our internal voices and the enemy. So, we may dismiss the reality and severity of what happened between our beloved strangers and us. Can we stop and taste our rotten teeth?
We will not be prepared for a text exchange with our beloved strangers—let alone reconciliation—without being able to distinguish among the types of shame and respond well.
At the same time, our doom scrolls continue marching. We try to dismiss cultural shame and thus numb our souls, putting us at risk of not feeling shame of any kind. We put our souls at risk of being calloused or seared to all kinds of shame. We’ll never be whole if we do.
In reality, the three voices of shame may be singing in dissonance to wake us up so that we can see ourselves correctly, begin or continue to seek forgiveness from God Himself, and prepare ourselves to make amends with our beloved children in His timing and grace.
Do you feel unsettled and like the melody of this devotional hasn’t resolved? Exactly.
Stay for a While
Read: 2 Corinthians 7. Try to identify all three kinds of shame in Paul’s writing. Next, look back into the previous chapters at the “promises” mentioned in verse 1. Then, dive deep into verses 9–11.
Pray: Thank God for shame. Thank Him for giving you a Geiger counter for sin. Then ask God to turn up your sensitivity so that you can be more aware and seek repair with others more quickly.
Write: Remain quiet for five minutes. Set a timer if you need to. Then write down any shame you feel, any shame at all. Come back at a later time, perhaps tomorrow, and work with God to classify your shame into the three categories.
Listen: “He Covers Me” by Steve Camp.