Ashamed: Fighting Shame With the Word of GodChikamu

Day Four

When I was a poor newlywed, I worked at a school and shared a car with my pastor-husband who worked about thirty minutes from my job. I often had to carpool or wait for rides. One day, the kindergarten teacher at my school noticed my plight and said, “I have an extra car sitting in my garage that’s not being driven. My husband and I want to loan it to you.”

But almost immediately, car-borrowing-tragedy struck. The loaner was an older convertible Mazda, and one day, I rolled down the window to find that it wouldn’t roll back up.

It was so horrifying and humiliating having to tell the kindergarten teacher that we broke her car. We ordered the broken window part but couldn’t afford to have it put back together. I told her we were working on it, and in an act of sheer mercy, she said, “Scarlet, don’t worry about it. We will fix the window. Just leave it in the parking lot.”

Humiliating, yes. Relieving? So much yes.

Fast forward a decade, and we found ourselves in a new city with new jobs, two fully functioning cars, and enough extra income to buy an iPad® but not enough to be able to replace it if something were to happen.

A family from our church with a bunch of young kids had my husband’s iPad, and when I went to pick it up at their house, the mom approached me with shame in her eyes and a hilarious sentence to share. “My son threw your iPad against the tree. I’m so sorry.”

She handed me the rectangle of broken glass and I said, “Don’t worry about it.”

And it was easy to say that. Not because we had money to replace it, but because people had done the same for us. God had done the same for us.

When you personally know how it feels to have a debt paid, it’s a joy to do the same for others.

It should work the same way for us as followers of Christ.

We can have the joy of living out each day we’re given in light of this overwhelming debt we’ve been relieved of. We can be the most gracious people in the world because we know what it is to be ashamed and humiliated and panicked because we’ve broken something and don’t have the means to fix it.

It’s amazing to me, the detail we are given about Jesus hundreds of years before His birth. God’s people were told what He’d be like, how He’d arrive, and about the shame He would carry.

Read Isaiah 53. Spend a few moments praying, thanking God for sending His Son to die in your place. Thank Him for His forgiveness and love.