Four
I Feel Guilty and Ashamed
Jesus, Set Me Free
I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me.
He freed me from all my fears.
Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy;
no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened;
he saved me from all my troubles.
Psalm 34:4–6
A genius God decided to make His home inside you, and when your heart begins to encounter a very real, very present Redeemer in relationship—One who promises to transform and restore you from within—the healing that takes place will naturally produce redeemed thoughts. Your brain cells will then start firing and creating new connections, reshaping the physical structure. Every part of your brain that might be in a deficit because of your past can be repaired and restored by being in relationship with someone who wants to be with you. Jesus wants a relationship with you so badly that He suffered and died to make this a constant reality.1
Why do I always over-apologize? Even for things that are not my fault? And why is it that when I feel guilty, fall short, or trip up, I consistently see myself on a trial stand in a courtroom, like I’m persistently on trial, always in need of defense?”
My questions perplexed my husband. He shrugged his shoulders and answered, “I don’t have the faintest idea.” Neither of us did. Kevin is patient and insightful. He’s not the berating kind. And I’ve walked with the Lord a long time. I know Scripture. I enjoy an intimate walk of faith with Jesus.
Even so, the courtroom image remained a regular screenshot in my brain, and sometimes even haunted me. Yet I didn’t know why. In the last chapter I described how a series of events stirred up unreasonable fears within me, and when I pursued Jesus in the midst of that season, He, in due time, brought clarity and wisdom to my soul. But in this particular moment, I wasn’t there yet.
Over the course of the several weeks that I interviewed a number of former prisoners, I felt sure I was going to trip up somehow in my own life. The threat of messing up hovered over me like a monster licking his chops at the sight of his prey. Where was my freedom? Where was my peace? Why did God seem silent? Again I begged God to show me what in the world was going on in me and around me.
“Coincidentally” during that time, we were working with a financial planner to make sure all of our ducks were in a row. During one of our meetings, our financial guy suggested that we update our life insurance since we hadn’t done anything with our policies in about twenty years. He looked at me and said, “You’ll both be interviewed on your medical history, and you’ll need to get a physical. And Susie, I’m not sure how this will go for you given your more recent health challenges.” I nodded in agreement and didn’t know what to expect.
One afternoon, a couple hours prior to the opening night of our radio station’s writers conference, the life insurance company called for my interview. I had time to spare so I said, “Sure, this is about as good a time as any.” Suddenly, the interviewer went into interrogation mode. Now, she was actually just doing her job and was most likely reading from a script, but her voice suddenly felt clipped and straightforward, and I felt on trial as she peppered me with questions: “We’ll need your medical records from the past ten years, and we’ll need to know about every doctor visit, hospital stay, X-ray, diagnosis, and medication prescribed. Are you prepared to answer these questions?”
I can’t explain what happened other than to say that I broke out into a cold sweat. Not because I had anything to hide or even because I was afraid of them denying me coverage. Given my challenging health history, I was absolutely terrified of getting an answer wrong. My unreasonable fears went into high gear. Will I go to jail if I get this wrong? Lord, I don’t want to make a mistake, but what if I do?
Again, my fears made no sense, but they were visceral for me. And clearly I wasn’t prepared for such an extensive interview. But this was about more than just being ill-prepared for an interview. I came as close to a panic attack as I’ve ever been. I tried to stay calm and asked if we could reschedule this call when I was more prepared to answer ten years’ worth of questions.
I put my phone on the kitchen counter, wrapped my arms around my stomach, and bent over like I was about to lose my lunch. I took several deep breaths and whispered a desperate prayer.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” Kev asked.
I blinked back my tears and asked, “Do you have to have insurance on me? Can’t my book royalties be your insurance?”
“Absolutely” he quickly replied. “I don’t care about the insurance. But there’s more under the surface for you. What’s going on? What are you afraid of?” He looked at me with compassion and concern in his eyes. “Something tells me that you have to face this thing. God is up to something here. And so is the devil. But you can win this fear-battle. I know it. You’re stronger than you think.”
This was one time I didn’t agree with my husband. Wherever this fear was coming from, it seemed stronger than me, and I felt sure it would swallow me whole.
Overall, the interview went okay (though I couldn’t wait to be done with it). My blood work looked great and, because I live a healthy lifestyle, I actually received a preferred-status rating. Go figure. My fears were more about making a mistake than they were about not qualifying for insurance. But the process sure stirred up my fears.
Facing this interview felt like a Herculean task for me. In my reasonable mind now, I’m embarrassed to admit it. But it’s part of my story. And this is how our unearthing works. The enemy keeps things hidden in our souls in a way that impacts us and imprisons us, but also in a way that escapes us. He stays in the shadows and threatens us with our worst fears using information from some of our worst traumas. Yet nothing for the Christ-follower is coincidental or even incidental. God used this time of shaking to unearth some deep-rooted weeds from my soil. Though the enemy threatened to undo me, he was the one undone in the end.
There comes a point when God knows we’re strong enough to win the battle. He allows an overplayed enemy attack to position us for freedom. When we finally grasp the lie, we’ll recognize our path to freedom. The storms reveal the lies we believe and the truths we need.
Unearthing Is Painful Yet Liberating
The following morning, I drove to the writers conference, excited about the full day ahead of me. I reviewed my various roles at the conference: I was scheduled to emcee, serve on a panel discussion, and teach a breakout session. I had worship music on in my car and soaked in the beautiful morning sunshine through the car window.
I prayed for the day and was singing along with the radio when all of a sudden a painful memory surfaced, and I gasped. I put my hand over my mouth and forced back a sob. I couldn’t do this now! I had a big job ahead of me that day! Lord, why now? Help me, Jesus.
Somehow, by the grace of God, I made it through my morning emcee duties. I tried to relax in the front row as my friend and our keynote speaker, Liz Curtis Higgs, shared about her broken past and her Redeemer who restores all things. She looked out at the crowd of aspiring authors and said, “That thing in your past that you’d rather forget, rather hide? You need to write about that. Don’t be afraid to revisit those places with Jesus. He’ll be with you. And someone needs to hear your story.”
Clearly, God was speaking to me.
The next morning, with my hands wrapped around a fresh cup of coffee and my Bible open in front of me, I let myself revisit the memory that about took me off the road the day prior.
Almost thirty years ago I was on bed rest due to an incompetent cervix (which made this a high-risk pregnancy). This was new territory for me.
One day while in the hospital on an IV in an effort to stop early labor, one of my nurse friends stopped by for a visit. We talked about delivery, doctors, and the process ahead of me.
She looked around, leaned in, and said, “Just pray you don’t get ‘Dr. Butcher’—that’s what we call him.” She gave me a penetrating look and continued in a low whisper, “We can look at a patient’s incision and guess who her doctor was. He makes the worst incisions, like he’s trying to destroy his patients,” she said with a shudder. “We’ve complained about him but to no avail.”
I swallowed hard and prayed I wouldn’t come face-to-face with Dr. Butcher. Women are never more vulnerable than during childbirth. And what should have been a beautiful—if intense—experience, turned into something nightmares are made of.
I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure you can guess which doctor I ended up with for my labor and delivery. It was a horrific experience. He was angry, rude, and reckless. And after Kev stepped out of the room to call the family, the doctor did a horrible thing while he stitched me up. I’ve never felt more fearful and degraded at the hands of someone I was supposed to be able to trust, not only with my life but also with the life we were bringing into the world.
When I went in for my six-week checkup with my regular OB (whom I loved), he asked about my experience. The mood suddenly shifted in the room. I surprised us both with my response. I started to tremble and cry, and I couldn’t even bring myself to look up at him as the story spilled out of me.
In the silence that followed, my dear doctor asked me to look up at him. I saw the muscles in his jaw flex. I could tell he was angry.
“Susie, I need you to go home and write in detail what you just told me. Don’t leave anything out. Get that letter into this office as soon as you can.”
It turned out that my doctor knew about similar situations and complaints, and wanted Dr. Butcher out of practice. But that’s easier said than done. So I did what he asked. People ask me why I didn’t sue this doctor, but I just couldn’t. Not only was I reeling from the whole experience, I had a newborn and a toddler to take care of. And my dad was battling cancer. I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. Furthermore, this incident happened in a day when everybody wanted to sue everybody. People became opportunists and the whole thing nauseated me. Plus, if I never saw the wretched doctor again, I thought I’d be better for it.
After teaching an aerobics class one day—six years later—I came home to a voicemail. The local news station said they were investigating a doctor who’d allegedly raped a patient and they’d learned that I’d also issued a complaint against him six years earlier. They wanted to interview me on my experience with this doctor.
Anxiety and fear shot through my body.
Then the machine played the second voicemail, this one from the attorney general’s office. They informed me that news outlets might reach out to me but instructed me not to talk with any of them. They had subpoenaed my records and needed me to meet them at my doctor’s office to get my records and to interview me.
I loved the doctors and nurses at my clinic. My stomach was in knots when I arrived there with a representative from the AG’s office. And the thought that other women suffered because I didn’t go after him six years prior? Well, I couldn’t even bear the thought of it. Talk about guilt.
The AG reps acquired my records and interviewed me. It had been six years since I’d written that letter, and I hadn’t seen it since that time. But I didn’t need to. I remembered what’d happened. After they interviewed me, they confirmed that my story matched my written letter to a T and that I would make a credible witness. Witness?
Can you see where this is going? The American Medical Association conducted an investigation against Dr. Butcher and I had to testify against him. Though I’d hoped to never face him again, I faced him on the stand. I was brave and consistent. His lawyer tried to bully me, and while he didn’t get away with it, sitting on the receiving end of an aggressive, accusatory lawyer, I felt like I was the one on trial, like I was the guilty one, I was the problem for saying there was a problem. There were several women who testified that day. Doctor Butcher ended up losing his license to practice medicine. But I felt like I’d lost something too. A piece of me never left that courtroom.
Kev and I walked away from the experience that day and never talked about it again. We both stuffed it away and forgot about it for no other reason except we already had a full plate with kids, bills, and life. But you never really forget about traumatic and hurtful events. Your body remembers. Your brain remembers. Your soul remembers. And your enemy remembers. That’s why traumatic memories must surface—so the enemy’s tactics will be exposed. And so God can uproot the weed and plant new seed.
Did you know the body holds on to our experiences? In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes
After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.2
That’s why we need to walk with Jesus through our past and let Him speak to us about what’s happened to us and about what we’ve done, so He can show us that His love is more than powerful enough to redeem and heal every aspect of who we are. When our souls heal, our physiology changes. When our brains start to grasp the Father’s love amidst the devil’s attempts to destroy us, our perspective changes, our thought process changes, and we are made new.
“It’s like these boulders are surfacing in my soil, and like it or not, this is my time to deal with them,” I said as Kev and I settled in for a dinner out with my sister and her husband. “Not sure why I used that analogy. It’s just what this feels like.”
“Susie,” my brother-in-law Rich said as he put his forearms on the table and leaned in, “you know that’s a thing, right?” He suddenly got a little animated. “Every year, by an act of nature, boulders and stones work their way to the surface. Farmers pay our sons every summer to move those boulders and rocks off of their fields so they can get ready for the harvest. What you’re describing as it relates to your soul actually happens in nature’s soil.”
The next morning at church, I stood during worship with my hands raised high. I felt raw from the unearthing process I was in, but I knew God was in it all with me. Nothing happened by chance. I closed my eyes during worship and thanked Jesus again for His commitment to me. Suddenly I saw the picture of a torn-up field: piles of dirt and stones and weeds. It was a mess. Just like me.
That’s when I heard the whisper: “This fallow ground is hallowed ground, and I’ve stationed guards around the perimeter to protect you. Those enemy taunts are coming from off of your property, so ignore them.”
My soul is fallow ground? And it’s also hallowed ground? And plowed up as I might be, I’m completely protected by the One who loves me? If this part of my story was sacred to God—the unveiling of old fears and traumatic memories—it needed to be sacred to me. No more apologizing or minimizing, no more entertaining feelings of inferiority or insecurity just because I happened to be a raw mess. I’m someone God loves, and He was up to something altogether new and beautifully good.
I decided I was all in. I refused to turn back, numb out, or run away in fear. I wanted to wholeheartedly embrace this process of inner healing so I could be fully alive and equipped for all God has purposed for me. Let’s do this, Lord.
I read up on fallow ground and here’s what I learned. When farmers dig up the ground and turn over the soil, they have to let it sit for a while. Embedded in the piles of dirt are recently uprooted weeds. They still hold moisture and could easily reseed, so they need to sit and dry up so they’ll die off. Then the ground can be leveled and prepared for a new harvest.
There are harvests that will grow only once the plow has done its work.3
I’ve noticed three ways that the enemy uses guilt and shame against us:
Trauma—We’re not actually guilty, but he gets away with accusing us because we feel guilty and the accusation feels true.
Past sins—We are actually guilty, and if we’re in Christ, we’re also forgiven, but we may not fully believe that Jesus’ sacrifice and victory were enough for us.
Current sins or indulgences—We default to these so as not to feel the hurts that lie beneath the surface; once again, the guilt we feel is real because we are guilty. We need to honestly face up to our destructive tendencies; we need to repent and walk away from these things. In due time we’ll come to see how they’re a poor substitute for the healing power of Jesus.
During a prayer time with a couple of my mentors, the Lord brought up that picture of me being on trial. One of my mentors prayed, “Jesus, show Susie where you are in this picture.” I swallowed back the lump in my throat, squeezed my eyes shut, and whispered a prayer: “Speak to me, Lord.” In that moment I pictured Him as He walked up to the stand, opened the gate, and took me by the hand. He walked me off of that stand and said to the crowd, “She’s not on trial here.”
That picture brought tears to my eyes. And a moment later, I saw Him on the stand for any defense I’d ever need. I was no longer on trial.
My overwhelming sense of chronic guilt disappeared.
If you’re in a season where unreasonable fears surround you or if you feel hypersensitive about your humanity and imperfections, know this: You will not stay this way. God is with you in it. He is up to something good. The devil fights dirty but he will not win. He will not. You will win. So stay the course. We’ll get through this together.
Maybe you don’t relate to such a drastic battle, at least not yet. But yours is more of a low-grade bout with shame and guilt. It never leaves you, but you’ve grown accustomed to it. Do you know that underneath that shame and constant sense of not-enough-ness is a place that Jesus wants to heal? Do you want to be free? I pray so. We’ll get to deep-rooted guilt and shame in a bit. Hang with me here. In fact, prayerfully read this passage:
I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me.
He freed me from all my fears.
Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy;
no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
In my desperation I prayed, and the Lord listened;
he saved me from all my troubles.
Psalm 34:4–6
No matter where life finds you today, this word is for you. Put this book down for a moment and pray through this passage of Scripture again. It’s living and breathing. It’s powerful and true. Call on God. Ask Him to deliver you from all of your fears. Imagine looking to Him with a radiant face, with no shame behind your eyes because you’re brand-new, healed and whole. Picture freedom and breathe it in. He intends to deliver you from your troubles, from your painful memories, and even from the unreasonable fears that occasionally surface.
There are things about you that are absolutely precious to God but that you’ve maybe overlooked, dismissed, or deemed unimportant.
The sooner we start measuring ourselves by God’s grace rather than by our past experiences or by man’s esteem, the sooner we will be comfortable in our own skin and begin to love our story. When we buy into the lie that we’ve still more debt to pay, fear and striving will always win the day. We work from a heart at rest because He loved us first.
If we stay the course and trust Jesus in this process, we will more fully grasp the Father’s unfathomable love and forgiveness. He will deliver us from shame and guilt and that plaguing sense of not-enough-ness.
And that enemy of our soul? He will lose courage and come trembling from his stronghold. He will lose. And we will win freedom and fullness we never thought possible!
Remember, God is more committed to your freedom and wholeness than you are. You can trust Him. Keep walking. This stuff is hard work, but the payoff is more than worth it in the end. I’m proud of you.