Guest Post Writers' Week
Scripture Reading: Psalm 3:3, Psalm 121:1-2, Matt 6:33, Luke 21:28, Psalm 27:6, Galatians 6:2, Psalm 46:1, Romans 8:1
“God is the lifter of our heads”. Those were powerful words during Andrea Breland’s beautiful testimony on Sunday morning. That image has stayed in my mind and my heart because it is a powerful image of our Abba God’s devotion to us.
Shame has caused me to walk with my head down for far too long. And what happens when we walk with our heads lowered? All too often we bump into things! We aren’t focused on the path in front of us. We can’t see what God has planned for us because our heads are down. Andrea painted the image of when our own children have their heads lowered, either because they are sad, or hurting, or embarrassed. As parents, we take our hands and cup their little chins, gently lifting their heads up to meet our face and we say, “Look at me! Look at me! It’s ok. I love you. We will get through this together.” Gosh, when I think of God cupping my chin and lifting my head up and saying those same words to me, “Look at me Marcia! It’s ok. I love you. We will get through this together.”, it just overwhelms me! Oh the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God for us! He does NOT want us to walk around engulfed in our shame! He wants us to remember our shame has been washed away by the power of the blood of Jesus! And that we are daughters of the King, clothed in righteousness and worthy of holding our heads up HIGH!
This weekend was all about how we can let our light shine out in this world. Sisters…. Satan uses our shame to put a bowl over our lights. Satan uses our shame to keep us living in the darkness. We can NOT let him dim our lights like that! On Saturday evening, Missy had us do a powerful and very eye-opening exercise. On a piece of paper was a long list of things that might be causing us some kind of shame. Bad decisions we have made. Bad things done to us. Hurtful things. Embarrassing things. We marked an “X” by each one that applied to us. (We did not mark our names on them so no one knew which paper belonged to who.) We then put all our papers in a bowl, mixed them up and passed them around again, each one of us now holding a paper that one of our sisters had filled out. As Missy went down the list, we stood if the piece of paper we were now holding had an “X” filled out by it. Instead of standing for ourselves, we stood for our sister. Our sister who was carrying that shame, that burden, that hurt. It was eye-opening to see how many of us all carried the same burdens, the same hurtful experiences, the same shameful decisions. Girlfriends, here me now: God may be the lifter of our heads, but our GIRLFRIENDS HAVE OUR BACKS!! Can you just picture that for a minute? God in front of us, lifting our heads, while a pile of girlfriends stand behind us, pushing us up so we don’t fall backwards? Ya’ll it’s true. I saw it with my own eyes this weekend, and it was a BEAUTIFUL THING!
So don’t let your shame dim your light. Don’t be afraid to share your burdens with your sisters. They will carry you. They will hold you up. And God will LIFT YOUR HEAD.
Dear Heavenly Father, our heads go down in times of trouble and sorrow - overpowered at times by the weight of our affliction. We know that you, our Abba Father, will lift our heads back up and remind us to look to YOU for our refuge and our strength. You remind us that if we seek YOU first and look to YOU always, you will give us our dignity and our strength back so that we can boldly go out in the world and let our lights SHINE! So that we can show the world who our HEALER is! May we always remember that we are daughters of the King, and there is no condemnation to those which are in Christ Jesus. Let us walk today and everyday with our heads held high, knowing that YOU make all things right and new again. In Jesus name, Amen.