Replacing Shame with Grace
It seems fitting that I am writing this piece just before Christmas. In my previous piece on guilt and mercy, I promised to discuss their siblings, shame and grace. While shame is closely linked to guilt, it is a battle all its own.
It’s been a while, so let’s refresh our memories on that vocab lesson from last time:
Guilt is thinking, “I did something bad.”
Shame is thinking, “I am a bad person.”
The losses we suffer on our journey to motherhood can heap immense guilt upon us, some of it earned but some of it not. Regardless of how the guilt gets there, the remedy is always mercy: “compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” This mercy comes from God, who doesn’t punish any of these sins as they deserve, but shows us His loving kindness in our afflictions from guilt.
But guilt can be a tricky business which will lead us right into the lap of what we’re going to look at today. If we don’t confront our own guilt and show ourselves the same mercy that God bestows upon us, we will end up in the spiral of shame, thinking that all of these sins- real and imagined- have turned us into a terrible person. This thought pattern is so much harder to get out of because it becomes ingrained in who we are. We look at that laundry list of sins that we feel guilty about and think, “This is just who I am now, a terrible person who does terrible things. No wonder so many bad things have happened to me; it’s what I deserve.”
In my own struggles following my miscarriage, I let each thing from my past pile on to my heart and ended up feeling an immense amount of shame about who I had been. I ultimately convinced myself this was who I still was, otherwise this tragedy would not have befallen me. “If I was a good person, God would see me as deserving of motherhood. But look at this mess I created in my life- that is not someone who deserves to be a mom! No wonder God allowed this to happen to me. He knew I would mess up that child just like I’ve messed up myself. I’m a terrible person and I don’t deserve the blessing of being a mom.”
This thought spiral ate away at my soul and each month following that miscarriage that we continued to not get pregnant, my thoughts appeared to be confirmed: “See! I told you. God knows He can’t trust you with a child so He’s not allowing you to get pregnant.” These thoughts can be so toxic, convincing us that we will never see the blessings we desire because who we are as a person makes us unworthy of them. We refuse to believe that God would ever allow these things in our lives.
Miscarriage and infertility themselves carry a huge amount of shame, too. I could not stop thinking about how my body was failing me at every turn, unable to do something that it was biologically supposed to be able to do with ease. I saw people on my social media accounts announcing pregnancies almost immediately after weddings, and wondered how they were able to do it so easily, possibly not even on purpose. As a high school teacher, I saw young female students walking the hallways of my school with pregnant bellies and wondered what would have happened if I had been able to try getting pregnant when I was in my 20s. I felt like a failure as a woman and as a wife, denying my husband a child and our parents a grandchild, and I chalked all of it up to the fact that I just wasn’t worthy of this part of womanhood. My body knew it and God knew it.
Once I finally became a mom, I found that it still wasn’t easy to shed this identity of shame. As I continued to carry all of this guilt, new guilt piled on- that “mom guilt” I mentioned in my last post. I now faced the guilt of not measuring up as a mom, thinking I was messing up my son, realizing that fear that I felt was the reason I wasn’t getting pregnant in the first place. So my shameful identity morphed, becoming this belief that I wasn’t a good enough mother and wife, that I was letting everyone in my family down. I convinced myself that God regretted the blessing He had given me, and that He was right all along to deem me unworthy.
Shame is a tool of the enemy. He loves for us to get trapped in these toxic spirals because he knows how much harder they are to break than the spiral of feeling guilt over one or two actions. As I said, shame becomes ingrained in who we are, so we settle ourselves to this fact and, if we get in too deep, we don’t attempt to get out- and Satan has us right where he wants us. The remedy is so easy to obtain, yet as humans, we make it so much harder on ourselves than it has to be. We try to heap the solution on ourselves: “if only I could be a better person, could stop sinning, could find the medicine to fix my body…” But God stands before us with open arms, ready to give us the solution FOR FREE: Grace.
Just as we did with mercy, let’s define grace: “the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.” Did you see that? “Free and unmerited.” We don’t have to do anything, be anything, or fix anything to get God’s grace. He just gives it to us- all of us- without expecting anything in return. That is the joy of living this side of the cross.
So how did we get here? The first mention of grace in Scripture just so happens to be in Genesis 6 at the very beginning of Noah’s story. This particular story is close to my heart and deeply rooted in my journey because, after all, the name of this blog is “Noah’s Rainbow.” I find it a sweet reminder from God that, even in the Old Testament, His entire plan for us was rooted in grace.
In the days of Noah, humankind was wicked; Scripture tells us that every thought that ran through a person’s mind was bent on evil. After creating man in His image to be in relationship with Him, sin had taken such a strong root that humans completely abandoned God and He regretted this creation. If, so far in this post, you have been thinking to yourself, “Sure, but you don’t know what I’ve done. It’s bad. I am totally deserving of my shameful title of ‘terrible human being,’” you can rest assured, you have company in this story.
Among all of these people, though, Noah had found favor with God. The King James translates verse 6:8, “But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” He had found acceptance in God’s eyes, which is why God entrusted him with the task of building the ark, saving his family and all the animals of creation.
Now before you start shouting, “Well he was probably a much better person than me! He probably never did anything wrong! That’s why he had God’s grace!” I want to point out two things.
First, Noah was not perfect. Later in Scripture, in chapter 9:20-28, we hear a story about Noah’s family that indicates to us that they were sinners just like you and me. After leaving the ark and receiving God’s covenant, Noah began to work the land to create a vineyard. He ends up passing out drunk and naked from drinking his own wine, and then when his son Ham stumbles in on him, Ham runs out to gossip to his brothers about the state of their father instead of protecting his father’s modesty. These may seem like minor sins to you, but to God, sin is sin. Not a single human being on earth has ever kept God’s commands perfectly, and that includes those who found favor from God all throughout Scripture.
Second, Noah was a follower of God in Old Testament times, which is prior to the cross of Christ. Receiving grace required something a whole lot different then than it does now (we’ll get there): sacrifices. The first thing Noah does after being released from the ark, is burn a sacrifice to God. This pleasing aroma convinced God never to destroy mankind again- and here’s the kicker- even though He knew they wouldn’t change. God was not deluded into thinking that humans were suddenly going to live perfect, sin-free lives, now that Noah and his family were going to restart the population. Even from the one who had found favor in His eyes, God knew more wicked humans would be created and things would go back to the way they were before. Yet He still makes His covenant with Noah. Why? Because He had a better plan.
Flash forward thousands of years. Just as God knew, humankind has filled the earth again and remained hellbent on wickedness. Four hundred years of silence- not a single word from God through a prophet- and then the cry of a baby in the dead of night. A chorus of angels appears before lowly shepherds to herald the Good News. A star rises that will guide Gentile kings to worship and offer gifts. God’s better plan has finally arrived.
The beginning of John’s gospel doesn’t have that Christmasy feel that I love about the gospel of Luke, but it is no less the beginning of God’s redemptive plan for all humankind. John tells us that God chooses to wrap Himself in human flesh and come down to earth as the light of the world. Jesus, the Son of God, is God incarnate, and John tells us in verse 1:12 that all who believe in Him are given “the right to become children of God.” This is the FREE gift of grace that no longer requires the sacrifices of the Old Testament. Verse 1:17 tells us that the law, which included sacrifices, was given to Moses, but grace was given to Jesus Christ. Through His sacrifice, all mankind receives God’s grace.
Want to know something fascinating about Scripture? Prior to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the word “grace” is only used 42 times in the KJV- and only 4 of those appear in the gospels!! But after the cross? The word “grace” appears 128 times as the New Testament writers stress the difference between the Old Testament law and the grace we now have because of Jesus. Almost all of the epistles (letters) in the New Testament start and end with the writer extending grace to the receiver. When I was looking up the Greek for “grace” in the New Testament, one definition added that these writers craved for their readers to have God’s grace, to which all spiritual blessings are due.
Look back at that definition of “grace” that I gave you earlier. God’s grace is twofold: it is our salvation as sinners- eternal freedom from the guilt AND shame that clothes us in our sin; and it is a bestowal of blessings- receiving of gifts from God in “the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13). Both of these aspects of grace can be found wrapped up in this part of the Greek definitions: God exerts His holy influence on our souls in order to turn us towards Jesus, increase our faith, and stir us to exercise our Christian virtues. God’s grace can replace our shame because we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit living in us, which causes our heart to desire God’s will more and more. We can receive this as a blessing here on earth which will ultimately reap rewards eternally as we bring more and more souls to God’s kingdom.
In those 128 times that “grace” appears after the gospels are so many gems about God’s grace:
Romans 5:20- “The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more.”
Romans 6:14- “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.”
2 Corinthians 9:8 (KJV)- “And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work.”
2 Corinthians 12:9- “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
The law that leads to our shame over sin is no more; we live under the grace of Jesus Christ, who enables us to abound in His good works and who’s power to provide us with grace is increased in our struggles. This is not a license to sin freely, but it is a blessing to live free from the shame of our sin. When we mess up, instead of wallowing to the point of staying stuck in our shame, we should bring it to God so that He can replace it with His grace. When we do this, we no longer let guilt pile up to become the shame we wear daily. Instead, we are covered with the grace that Jesus died to give us, which silences the enemy’s lies about the terrible people he wants us to believe that we are.
The anxieties of pregnancy after loss and infertility can cause us to feel shame over our past. We can carry that shame into motherhood and feel like we’re never living up to the blessing God has bestowed. We believe that our sins have made us bad people and we use that to convince ourselves that God has chosen not to bless us, or that He will cause something tragic to happen because of who we are.
But when we replace our shame with God’s grace, we find joy in the fact that we have free, unearned favor in God’s eyes, given to us as a blessing through our salvation in Jesus. Let go of that shame by clinging to His grace today, and rejoice in His loving kindness!
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