I Made A Mistake, I Am Not A Mistake Series

I like this image, because it represents God as parent, God as mother, God as Father.

It’s a healthy way to see God, to feel God, if we can separate it from our own experience with imperfect parents, or of h being imperfect parents.

We’ve been talking about a lot of things in this course that normally don’t come up in regular conversation or in public programs.

There are particular topics that we are generally encouraged to avoid, classically those include politics and religion.

But something that we often do not discuss with others is shame, or guilt. Both of those topics can be triggering, and both of those topics can be tied up in a whirlwind of emotions.

No one likes to think about their shame. No one likes to dwell on their feelings of guilt.

So why are we talking about this today? It’s because guilt and shame are human realities.

That means if you are human, at some level you do have, or had had, struggles with guilt and shame.

And very likely, because guilt and shame occupy a similar zone in our psyche, in our brains, they can become conflated, mixed together, mistaken for one another.

And when they find expression in our minds and in our emotions, they seem to intermingle in a way that would indicate that it is worth our while to disentangle these two things: guilt and shame.

And you might wonder, well how are they different? Aren’t they synonyms? Two words that basically mean the same thing. The answer is, no, they are not the same thing.

Shame comes from a negative focus on the self – our core identity; guilt comes from a negative focus on a specific behavior.

Guilt says, “I made a mistake,” shame says, “I am a mistake.”

Guilt says, “I did something bad,” shame says, “I am something bad.”

So the focus of guilt is behavior; the focus of shame is identity. That’s worth saying again. PPT

We feel guilty when we know that we have done something that we know is wrong.

And at the same time, to complicate things even further, another thing that leads to feelings of guilt is we often enough don’t do the things we know we should do.

Doing things that we know are wrong is an ancient human thing. Being at times a confusing mystery to ourselves is an ancient human thing.

The Apostle Paul wrote very candidly about his own internal turmoil. In Romans chapter 7 he wrote:

Romans 7:15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

The Message paraphrase of the Bible puts it this way: 15 What I don't understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise.

Can you relate? A few seconds later he writes: 18b ...I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

So...Being a confusing mystery to ourselves is an ancient, universal human thing.

Paul is giving us a very candid, very honest, brutally truthful insight into the universal human condition, the brokenness that comes with being human.

Of course this is not a constant reality that we consciously face every second of the day. That would be exhausting and overwhelming.

But it is a thing that we come up against in ourselves when it comes to the challenge of “walking the talk”, of living our lives in accordance with our values and beliefs.

It’s like our values and beliefs are under ours and life’s constant scrutiny and are being challenged on the regular.

But also note that Paul’s focus here is on his behaviour, his actions, what he does and NOT his identity.

He is honest about, he is able to be honest about his shortcomings, because he is clear on his identity.

Due to his faith in Jesus, Paul knew that first and foremost his identity was that of a beloved, adopted child of the most high King of the universe.

That knowledge served him well through a life of trial and struggle.

Again, guilt addresses what we do, shame attacks who we are. So we need to find a way to identify which emotion we’re feeling.

And that’s not too hard. We need to watch our self-talk.

If what we’re saying to ourselves and feeling is that we’re worthless, pointless, dumb and such, which by the way has a very energy- and hope-draining quality to it, then we need to put the brakes on it in our minds.

We need to pause, we need to slow down, we need to distinguish.