Word of the Father · Day 188/366
The Shame You Hide
“They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.”
Psalm 34:5
There's a corner inside you where an old shame lives, hidden for so long it no longer feels like a wound, it feels like part of who you are. You lock it away there, afraid that if anyone saw it up close, they would stop loving you the way they love you today. I already saw all of it, long ago. And I am still here, I never left.
Shame lies when it tells you that you are your worst moment, reduced to a single mistake or a single story. That isn't true, and it never was. You are not what happened to you, nor what you did when you were most lost and without direction. I look at you and I don't see a lowered, ashamed face; I see someone who can still be lit up from within, again.
Come close, without hiding anything from Me, not even the details you think are ugliest. I don't draw back from your hardest story, I never have. I know how to lift the chin of someone who has been looking down for so long they no longer remember what it felt like to face the world head-on.