In Psalms 25, the psalmist is eagerly giving God his heart, the source of his shame. He knows without a doubt that the only way he can live a hopeful life is to be taught new ways of seeing good in himself. He relinquishes his heart into the tender arms of God’s unfailing love. When we give up ownership of our distorted lives, God will implant in us His purposes. We will be protected by integrity and uprightness and be able to live our lives with new intentionality and authenticity.
Most of you don’t remember the time when the only way to get a colored photographic image was a slide. And paper photos only came in black and white, which could be then touched up with color.
As missionaries, my parents took a ton of slides! Thank goodness, my older sister sorted them all out and put them on a thumb drive for each of us. What a labor of love! Anyway, back to my parents, the slides were easy to store and an efficient means of chronicling their work to later present at those ubiquitous missionary slide shows sandwiched between Sunday morning worship and dinner on the grounds stateside as we traveled to different churches every weekend while on furlough.
The rare black and white photos were for personal family albums and sharing. The negatives of these black and whites were stored in sleeves accompanying each pack of photos. We used to order extra black and whites to mail to family and friends.
A favorite game we played as children was “guess the people” in the negatives. What is a negative? It is an image of the exact opposite of what is real, yet it is a picture of the real thing! The images in negatives are distorted, thus the premise of our silly childhood guessing game.
Shame in our lives happens in the same way. We see a situation in a distorted version and behave according to the “negative” snapshots in our mental family album. Isn’t it time to leave those distorted images at God’s feet?
In this new year, are you allowing distorted pasy images of shame to dicate how you see yoursself in today’s reality?
In you, Lord my God, I put my trust.
I trust in you; do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me.
No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame, but shame will come on those who are treacherous without cause.