Have you ever done something and later realized that your actions broke relationships? How about the things you did to break relationship with yourself through the ways you chose to govern your life poorly—your finances, your body, your mind, your mental and emotional health, and your spirit? Often the actions that break our relationships rise from our shame, our sense of unworthiness. In our attempts to cover our nakedness, we pull back from the ones who love us. We hide, refusing to get help, and people get hurt.
Shame leaves us standing alone—separated from one another. It causes us to lash out, then tells us to cover our sin, to deny it and defend it and spin it. And on the flip side, shame leads us to craft armor to protect our hearts from more disengagement and separation. This is what it looks like to sew a protective covering of fig leaves, to believe the foundational lie that this sin, ours or theirs, is confirmation that we are, indeed, worth nothing behind the fig leaves.
Lisa Sharon Harper is the author of The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right along with several other books. A sought-after speaker, she is also the chief church engagement officer at Sojourners. Content excerpted from The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Sharon Harper. Excerpted by permission of WaterBrook, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
