Reflection

There are wounds we learn to live with long before we understand them. Words spoken over us that we never asked to carry. Moments that shaped us in ways we didn’t choose. Things that happened to us at the hands of life, not because we deserved them, but because the world can be a broken place.

And yet, shame still finds a way to settle into our hearts. We are made to feel responsible. We internalize the dysfunction. We call it ours. We believe that if we had just been stronger, if we had just been less tender, maybe then we would have been safe. Maybe then they would have stayed. Maybe then we wouldn’t have been so hurt.

That is not the voice of God. 

That is not conviction, it is distortion. The enemy works through confusion, through misplaced blame, through the illusion that you are defined by the things that have happened to you, the things that have darkened your hope. But God separates who you are from what you have been through. He does not ask you to carry shame for what wasn’t yours to begin with.

You are not responsible for the decisions other human beings made. You are not to blame for the pain they refused to name. Healing does not mean pretending it didn’t hurt — it means allowing God to speak the truth of it, to lift the weight of false guilt, to remind you that you never had to earn protection, that your worth was never meant to be proven to him through suffering.

Shame loses its grip when you begin to see yourself the way God sees you. You are blameless, you are held. You are not what happened to you. You are not who they said you were. You are loved. You are safe. You are free.

Prayer

God, I’ve been carrying a weight that was never mine to hold. I bring you the shame, the confusion, the false responsibility. Remind me that I am not defined by what was done to me. Heal the places where I learned to blame myself just to make sense of this pain. Help me to release the guilt that never belonged to me in the first place. Thank you for making me clean, for seeing me as whole, and for staying close to me in the experiences I thought disqualified me from your love. I trust you to finish what you started in me. 

Amen.