When You Are Tested on the Very Truth You Declare, Part One
Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.
Luke 22:31-32
When we are tested on the very truth we declare, we really should not be surprised, but we often are.
I wasn’t thinking about this on the day I met Hamida. She had traveled for days from the desert to reach our clinic, and her shyness was tangible as she sat before me, eyes averted and hands fluttering nervously in her lap. The flowing orange melhfa she wore barely covered the ugly scar that dripped down her face. “My mother-in-law did it with boiling oil,” she murmured, pulling aside the cloth to show me. “She said I deserved it. To burn away the shame I brought to her family. I cannot get pregnant.”
It was not uncommon for burn survivors to come to our free surgery clinics, but no matter how many came, I never got used to seeing women with severe scarring from intentional honor assaults. Many had healed all alone, isolated, punished. Most had come to our clinic in secret, risking further shame and punishment in their hope for help. All were seeking honor instead of shame.
As the bright morning sunlight pushed through the window I told her how the Messiah Jesus gave His life to abolish shame forever and give us honor instead. Honor that could not be taken away by cruelty or human acts of rejection. As Hamida leaned in close to listen, her melhfa slipped away, exposing her whole face. She didn’t seem to notice. She was focused on good news she’d never heard before, enthralled at the thought of a God who loved and honored women, even women who deserved to be burned (her words).
I had no idea that in just a few years, shortly after I began teaching others how to share the gospel message of honor instead of shame, my own child would be critically burned and sustain lifelong scars and deformity over more than thirty percent of his body. His battle with shame would mock the truth I proclaimed.
I couldn’t have known I would devote years to tending my son’s physical, mental, and emotional wounds as he fought to overcome shame. I never imagined I would spend countless sleepless nights weeping over the truth that set me and Hamida free, arguing with God about it, begging God to show my child that his honor, too, had been secured by Jesus.
At times I would argue with God about the unfairness of it all. How I deserved freedom for the generations after me because I had fought so hard to become free myself. I had believed His promises. My own words, my own teaching, would stand around me in the night watches like a group of Pharisees casting judgement.
There comes a time in our journey with Jesus when the very lie from which we have been delivered, the sacred space where victory was hard-won by Jesus’s blood, the truth that has set us free, becomes the place where we are cruelly challenged.
We are tested on the very truth we declare. #faith #discipleship #honorinsteadofshame Share on XLooking to the heavens in agony, we grimace in pain and disbelief and wonder how this can be happening.
If this describes you or someone you love, join me here next week for Part Two of When You Are Tested in the Very Truth You Declare. If you would like to read more of Hamida’s story and other women like her who have made the brave journey from shame to honor, get a copy of Covered Glory: The Face of Honor and Shame in the Muslim World by clicking here.
Lord, in the time of testing, help my faith not to fail that I may turn and strengthen my brothers. Amen.
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