Sometimes our conference considers a topic that is critical but that you might not necessarily find in your own life. Our “Psychiatric Disorders” conference spoke to that kind of topic. This year we are back to a topic that is common to every person in every culture. Guilt and shame can be found everywhere—absolutely everywhere.
This week our host Andrew Ray sits down with Dr. David Powlison and Julie Lowe to discuss how they developed the image for our 2012 national conference on shame and guilt.
"I've never told anyone this before." I've heard this sentence too many times to count. When I hear it, I have immediate compassion, because whatever is to come next is extremely sensitive information that, for any number of reasons, has remained a deep, dark secret until this moment. And I admit, whenever I hear this sentence I also cringe a little inside, because there's a good chance I'm about to hear something that will break my heart.
Guilt is easy to identify, shame less so, and there are reasons why.
One is that guilt is black or white. You did wrong or you didn’t. Yes, we can be blind to our wrongness, but when we are willing to open our eyes, matters of right and wrong are blatant. Shame, on the other hand, can be more difficult to trace to a specific act or act done to you. With shame, we feel like we did wrong, but we can’t always identify what that wrong was, or we can identify a thousand wrongs, though none of them might be the actual trigger for shame.
A few weeks back, I wrote about how Peter objected to having his feet washed by Jesus1 (John 13). Certainly one of the reasons Peter balks is the same reason most of us object to Jesus’ touch —shame. We don’t want someone else — least of all God — to “touch” our guilt. But as Jesus tells Peter, we must accept his “touch”— it is the only way we can have a part with him. We have to let him serve us, we have to let him wash us, because only he has the power to forgive sins, to heal wounds, to restore meaning and purpose, to make us clean.
