Replacing Guilt with Mercy
Let’s start with a vocabulary lesson today. The English teacher in me wants to make sure we all have a clear understanding of some words that are vital to today’s thoughts :)
Personally, I struggle a great deal with Biblical words that seem to mean the same things and are often used interchangeably in Scripture. Two such words are “shame” and “guilt.” I have always treated these words as synonyms, and in a lot of ways they are. But this past January (feels like a century ago, doesn’t it!), I was in some professional development at school, and the speaker- who was presenting on trauma-based teaching- said something incredibly profound about the difference between these two words:
Guilt is thinking, “I did something bad.”
Shame is thinking, “I am a bad person.”
In this light, they become incredibly unique from one another. Based on these lines of thinking, guilt is something that we can move past, if we rectify the bad thing we have done. However, shame feels more permanent, as if so many bad things have stacked up on our “guilty” list that there is no way to get out from under them; they just become who we are.
God has the answers for both of these thought patterns, and I’m going to address them both in time. Today, my focus will be on guilt, and the next time I write a piece like this, I will focus on shame.
In my own experience with pregnancy loss, guilt is an emotion that has taken a prominent seat in my mind. I have talked with so many other women about their struggles with pregnancy loss, and this emotion is not unique to me; it is a struggle that many women face as they cope with their loss.
Four years ago when my first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at 5 weeks, I instantly felt the weight of guilt pressing down on me. I kept running through the previous week in my head, trying to find the thing I had done, or the thing I didn’t do, that had caused this loss. I went back to the week before that pregnancy test, trying to see if there was something that had happened before I knew I was pregnant. I felt so guilty about this invisible thing that had caused my miscarriage when the truth of the matter was, not a thing I did or didn’t do caused that loss. But in the moment, the only person I felt bore the blame was myself.
I also started digging up guilt from my past, sins from my college years that did not shed the nicest of lights on me as I navigated the dating world trying to find my future husband and father of my children. Although I had confessed those sins time and again to God, and although I firmly believe that God forgives our sins and remembers them no more, I felt that my miscarriage was God’s way of punishing me for that past. These two heaping piles of guilt were a burden I carried for a long time after my loss, frequently exacerbated by my struggle with infertility.
Other women I’ve talked to about their losses expressed different types of guilt associated with their miscarriage. Mommas who have miscarried after having their first child have felt the guilt of their own grief. They don’t think they have a right to mourn the loss of that pregnancy because they have already been blessed with a child and should be grateful for that. They also feel guilty for grieving when they already have a child because of the women they know who are struggling with infertility. They feel they should just be grateful that they have had one child instead of dwelling on a loss that some women haven’t even come close to experiencing. Many shared with me that early losses made them feel guilty for grieving when they knew women who had suffered late losses or stillbirths. This is another guilt I experienced. Why should I be so sad over a pregnancy that I knew about for a week when some women carry babies for months and months, even fully giving birth, before they lose their child? We can feel like our loss is nothing compared to that grief.
I found that guilt- no matter how it expresses itself within us- doesn’t go away when you get pregnant again after a loss. It just changes shape. The guilt over my past sins that I felt after the loss of my first pregnancy grew tenfold when I found out that our embryo transfer had been successful. Was more punishment headed my way? Were those sins still trying to take me down, even though I had confessed them to God? Was I ultimately going to continue suffering loss after loss because of what I had done? These thoughts swirled in my brain and tried to consume me, but thankfully God’s Word always delivers the remedy for these thought patterns. For this one in particular, the answer is mercy.
Ready for some more vocab? The definition of mercy is “compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” If anyone is in a position of power to punish or harm us, it is God. But in His loving kindness towards us, He offers compassion and forgiveness for EVERYTHING we have done. Don’t believe it? Think of the most heinous sin you’ve committed while I share the story in Scripture where God’s mercy is first revealed. Fair warning: this story is quite disturbing!
In Genesis 19, we find Lot living in a city associated with Sodom and Gomorrah. Even if you have limited Biblical knowledge, you may recognize these places as wicked and incredibly sinful because God eventually destroys them. Lot is approached by two angels and he takes them to his house for dinner. An angry mob of men arrives at his door and demands that Lot hand these angels over to them so that they can rape them. In order to prevent this mob from their wickedness, Lot decides to offer up his virgin daughters instead so that they “can do what [they] like with them” (verse 8).
Still got the worst sin you think you’ve ever committed in your mind? In your human mind, is that sin worse than allowing your daughters to be raped by an angry mob? The thing about our human minds is that we rank sins. We see some things as not so bad, mild sins, and other things as horrific, heinous sins. God doesn’t see sin like this- it’s all the same to Him. But either way, He has made room to show mercy to all of it, no matter how bad our human minds think it is.
The angry mob is not satisfied with Lot’s offer, so they attempt to break down his door to get to the angels, who pull Lot back inside to safety and tell him to gather up his family to leave the city, as it is about to be destroyed. Lot does as directed, but as they are departing the city, he and his family hesitate, forcing the angels to literally drag them out of town. Verse 16 says that they “led them safely out of the city, for the Lord was merciful to them.”
It was fully within God’s power to punish Lot for the sin of offering up his daughters for rape. Some of us might argue that God should have left him there in Sodom and Gomorrah to be destroyed with everyone else for such a terrible sin. But instead, God had compassion on Lot and forgave him this sin, acting with complete and utter mercy by rescuing him from that very destruction. Lot did not deserve this, and if truth be told, we don’t deserve that mercy either. Sin is sin and all of it goes against God. But just as God showed mercy on Lot, He shows it to us every single day.
If you are currently pregnant after a loss, you may be wondering if your guilt will naturally subside once your rainbow baby is born; I wondered the same thing myself, thinking I would no longer have to fear the punishment of my sins once I gave birth. But motherhood, especially after loss and infertility, has a funny way of keeping the guilt flowing. In the early weeks and months, I checked his breathing constantly. Today, I feel pangs of anxiety every time he takes a tumble and bumps his head. And my guilt is not just in those past sins or the what ifs of my loss. I now face mounting guilt from all sides: being a working mom or taking time for myself makes me feel guilty about what I’m missing in my son’s life; evaluating what I feed him, how much screen time he’s had, or how I put him to sleep makes me wonder if I’m messing him up; not keeping up with the housework or other things on my to-do list has me feeling like a failure. The devil has a way of pointing out every flaw we have as moms so that our guilt never leaves us.
BUT: “The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23 NLT). Every morning when we wake up, we start with a clean slate of mercy from God that covers every possible sin we could commit. So that guilt from our past and present that makes us fear a punishment is coming? It is covered in God’s mercy. That guilt we feel over things we have no need to be guilty for? The guilt of doing something to cause a loss? The guilt of grieving a loss too soon? The guilt that we’re not measuring up in motherhood? God’s mercy covers that, too. God will be faithful in His mercy each and everyday, which gives us the ability to relinquish that guilt to Him and bask in that mercy instead.
You might be trying to outwit your guilt by racking up a whole list of good deeds to outweigh any bad you may have done in your past. While I will never say that we shouldn’t be doing good in this broken world, this particular motivation is not from God. Titus 3:5 says that Jesus “saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” That list of good deeds, while wonderful in the eyes of man and God, is not what frees us from our guilt, and it is not what causes Jesus to save us eternally. No good we can do could ever permanently erase the sin we have done and will do in our humanness. Only the mercy of Jesus to be forgiving enough to go to the cross for us can cover all of our sins.
I love the definition for the Hebrew word for mercy in this verse. Eleos means “kindness, good will towards the miserable, afflicted; a desire to help them.” Isn’t that such a vivid picture of how our guilt can make us feel: miserable and afflicted? We will do just about anything to remove those awful feelings! When Jesus looks on us in this state, He desires nothing more than to help us. His mercy is our rescue from our miserable guilt.
The anxiety that pregnancy loss and infertility bring causes us to feel guilty, thinking we have done something or failed to do something that has caused our tragedy. We let Satan convince us that our circumstances are punishment for our past mistakes. But trading guilt for mercy helps us forgive ourselves for sins that God has already forgiven us for so that we can find joy in the salvation we have in Jesus, who doesn’t punish us as we deserve.
I know all too well the struggle of guilt that comes with pregnancy loss and infertility, and how a new, successful pregnancy doesn’t necessarily alleviate that guilt, even when baby is earthside. But it is possible to stop the thought spirals that Satan loves for us to dwell in, when we await punishment for our past sins at every turn because of that guilt. We may try to cover that guilt with good deeds, but the only sure fire way to let go of your striving and your guilt is to grasp on to Jesus’s mercy for dear life.
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