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Shame, Brene Brown, and the Gospel

by | Jun 24, 2014 | Learning Story

“We are having a problem with this shame-resilience group.”

“What is that?”

“We don’t like the word ‘shame.’”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“We’d like to call it ‘sha-may’.”

This is part of a dialogue in a delightful clip of Dr. Brene Brown’s presentation at the “Up Experience.” If you haven’t yet heard of Brene Brown, she is a sociologist and a self-proclaimed “shame-researcher.”

As a women passionate about helping other women live authentic, courageous, connected, compassionate lives, I have been intrigued by Dr. Brown’s work on shame and vulnerability and her invitation to women and men to yield striving in perfectionism and performance.

(I also enjoy the fact that Dr. Brown will be found in either cowgirl boots or clogs. If you know me, you know why:-)!)

Her sense of humor and delight in story is compelling, and she is majoring on all the important attributes of a life well-lived. I’m a fan.

As I listened to her thoughts on shame and “living story,” I thought about my life and the lives of women I coach. We desperately need to know the real reason we have freedom from sha-may. Brene says the cure for perfection and performance is knowing “I am enough.” I would adjust that slightly and say, “I am not enough. Christ is more-than-enough. The odd truth of the gospel is that God gave me Christ’s more-than-enough-ness. (righteousness).”

According to the gospel, my real hope for freedom from shame comes from the Cross. Here is the strange  storyline: Christ died for me, a sinner, on the Cross, and even more surprising, God has called me “so very right” in Christ.

Here’s what that looks like in real life: I’ve done things I should be ashamed of – sin — turned my back on a friend, yelled at my children, dissed my husband. There’s no enough-ness in me that can save me from that shame. But Christ can, Christ has, and Christ will again. Christ, the perfect, sinless God-man, so much more-than-enough, shamed “sha-may.” In Christ, God has made me new creation and declared me — more-than-enough-in-Christ.

Therein lies the freedom from perfectionism that our hearts desperately need. In this story, we truly can live freely enjoying and glorifying God, enjoying and loving others.

Sufficiency for Scarcity: An Insomniac Wrestles with Fear

by | Jan 31, 2013 | Learning Story

Sweet rest is sufficient.

Cartoonchurch.com

“My grace is sufficient for you.” Recently I experienced one of those heavyweight championship bouts with horrendous insomnia. Some of you know the kind – top ten terrible —  when you are awake alone for so many hours you go beyond worrying whether you will sleep that night and begin to believe you will never actually sleep again.

Finally, I remembered one of the best strategies for beating the monstrous fear, which is the larger beast than the Insomnia itself – rest. Repeat something true and meaningful — for me, on this night, “Be still and know that I am God, came to mind.” Repeat it gently, and rest in its reality. Take deep breaths, and rest. Be very still. Know that God is God.

As my body began to calm and my mind began to slow the race, another verse entered my head, welcome but unsought: “My grace is sufficient for you.”

There is no fairy tale ending. I didn’t fall asleep and rest like an infant should. I drifted eventually into one of those light imitation versions of pseudo-sleep and woke feeling the reality of the night, as if I had hardly slept at all. BUT – I did rediscover the reality I need to know in times of fullness and scarcity – God’s grace is sufficient. I actually marveled through the day at how relatively energetic I felt – where did that come from, I would think, as I walked out of an hour and a half at PT with a little extra?

Brene Brown talks about how fear of not having enough interferes with an attitude of joy:  “These are anxious and fearful times, both of which breed scarcity. We’re afraid to lose what we love the most, and we hate that there are no guarantees. We think if we can beat vulnerability to the punch by imaging loss, we’ll suffer less. We’re wrong. There  is one guarantee: if we’re not practicing gratitude and allowing ourselves to know joy, we are missing out on the two things that will actually sustain us during the hard times.” The Gift of Imperfection

She quotes Lynne Twist’s book, The Soul of Money about being enough:

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” the next one is, “I don’t have enough time.” whether true or not, that thought of ‘not enough’ occurs to us automatically before we even think to examine it or question it….

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mindset of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough and we’re not enough.”

I think Brown and Twist are on to something with this fear of scarcity. They take me back to my need to rest in the heart of sufficiency:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” 2Corinthians 12:9

How about you? What do you not have enough of, or fear not having enough of? How does God meet you in this fear?

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