By Kimberly Davidson
My senior year was coming to a close. In our sorority, the junior class had a tradition of roasting the senior class with a “special gift.” I feared what toxic tribute waited for me. My gift was a box of laxatives. Mortified, my face turned scarlet red. I wanted to run, to cry. Instead I laughed with the rest of them, “Ha, ha. You’re so funny!”
You might as well have embedded a scarlet “S” for “shame-filled” on my chest. Harsh judgment from others only strengthened the erroneous core belief that I was irreparably flawed. Everybody else was in on the “the joke” except the person who is going through it. I anxiously sat through rest of the roasting, and since misery loves company, I prayed another girl would be crucified. No such luck. I died alone. Like a play, the curtain parted and my neurosis appeared center stage for all to see. I felt naked and mortified.
If we didn’t long to be wanted and loved, then we wouldn’t care. If we didn’t care, then we couldn’t be shamed by other’s rejection or attacks.
Last month, I suggested as a way of breaking the chains of shame, we speak out and tell our story. This month I want to share with you a powerful teaching of Jesus’s that literally set me free from shame, and I’m confident it will you too.
Psychologist Dorothy Rowe said, “To turn “natural” sadness into depression, all you have to do is blame yourself for the disaster that has befallen you.” If we desire to overcome shame (and often the accompanying depression), we need to figure out who is responsible. Who is really at fault? So, we clarify ownership. Jesus said:
The things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man ‘unclean.’ For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean’ … (Matthew 15:18-20).
The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks (Luke 6:45).
Some people can torment us into believing we’re dirty, unworthy, and unacceptable to God and to others, and we’re to blame. In biblical times, this condition was called “unclean.” Unclean translated means “impure.” Jesus is saying: It’s not what goes in my mouth that defiles me; it’s what comes out of my mouth and heart that defiles me. The mouth reveals most clearly the condition of the heart and thereby behavior. Therefore, if another person spews their verbal vomit onto me—calls me a blah…blah…blah, they cannot destroy my soul with their tongue, or make me feel contaminated because the verbal vomit came out of their mouth; it came out of their heart. The only thing that can dirty me is what comes from inside of my heart.
Second Corinthians 5:17 confirms that you are a new creation in Christ. You are no longer the same person. You have been made new spiritually by the power of God. Grasping the truth of Jesus’s words doesn’t change what happened, but it does change our perceptions of the event; it doesn’t rewrite the past, but it does rewrite the brain by rewriting a shame based sense of self.
