Three hundred people gathered on the floor of Design Exchange on Bay Street in Toronto, site of the original Toronto Stock Exchange. Most attending the meeting, called Creative Mornings, were young, creative professionals.
The speaker asked attendees to pull out the smartphones and fill out a form on his website. “Write down your biggest fear, your biggest regret, or what makes you ashamed,” he said. “It’s anonymous. We’ll see your answers, but we won’t know who submitted them.”
He’d programmed the submissions to appear on the screen behind him. As the screen filled with people’s answers, the room went silent.
Everyone may have looked okay on the outside, but everyone carried a weight of shame.
Our Shame
I’m noticing similar themes as I talk to people around me. Most of us look okay on the outside, but we all carry wounds. We all bear the secret weight of shame: the sense that we’re not okay, that we’re not good enough.
Shame has its place; certain actions should make us feel shame. But it’s been weaponized against us by sin. It causes us to hide from each other and from God. Rather than running to God with our shame, we hide like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
None of this is new, but I sense an uptick in shame. Shame may be one of the greatest challenges we face, and it’s only getting worse as our culture moves to becoming more shame-based, and as we suffer the effects of isolation and the emptiness of secularism.
Shame may be one of the greatest challenges we face, and it’s only getting worse.
God’s Compassion
What’s the antidote to shame?
Culture’s antidote is self-acceptance: you’re okay; there’s nothing wrong with you; stop listening to the voices of self-condemnation; love yourself. This approach fails. There is something wrong with us. The more we try to deal with your own shame, the worse the problem gets.
God’s answer to shame is different. When Adam and Eve felt shame for the first time, they hid themselves from God. But God came looking for them; it was time for their regular walk. God sought them out. God reclothed them. Sin brought lasting consequences, but God launched a plan to deal with their guilt and shame.
We tend to think that God isn’t equipped to handle our shame. We think he’ll join in the chorus of condemnation. He would be right to do so.
Instead, God provides the solution to shame. He reclothes us. He pursues us. He shows us compassion. He launches a plan to deal with our weight of shame.
We must run to God with our shame. “His heartful thoughts for you outstrip what you can conceive,” writes Dane Ortlund. “He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him. He doesn’t limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.”
God can more than handle our shame.