Faith & Formation
Revelation Is Not Rejection
She said it in my office in February, in the second session, looking at the carpet, in the tone of a person reading a verdict aloud.
My reaction proves that my faith isn’t real.
I have heard the same sentence from pastors, from teenagers, and from a retired judge, and it is always that tone. Sometimes it arrives dressed differently. I should be further along. If I really trusted God I wouldn’t be so afraid. He must be so disappointed in me. I failed under pressure, so there’s no coming back from this.
Five sentences. Put them side by side and you see what they have in common.
the five sentences
- “I should be further along.”
- “My fear means I do not trust God.”
- “My reaction invalidates my faith.”
- “God must be disappointed in me.”
- “Because I failed under pressure, I cannot recover.”
Every one takes something the moment revealed — a fact about where you are — and converts it into a ruling about who you are and where you stand with God. Every one treats a revelation as a rejection.
And every one is a lie. Not because the fact underneath is false. You did hit the wheel. You did misuse the card. You did say the thing in front of the children. The facts stand. What does not stand is the verdict, and the One who would have to issue it has said, in writing, that He has not.
two kinds of grief, and how to tell them apart at 2am
Paul wrote to a church he had hurt. He had sent a hard letter, it had landed hard, and for a while he regretted sending it. Then he heard how they responded and wrote back a sentence I would put on the wall of every counseling room in the country.
Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly grief produces death.
Two griefs. Same trigger. The same sting of being seen, at first. Then two completely different roads. One moves — it produces a turning, and the turning ends up somewhere good, and you do not regret having gone. The other does not move. It sits.
Here is the test, and it is a single question about direction.
Conviction says: this response is inconsistent with who God is forming you to become.
Shame says: this response proves you are incapable of becoming anything different.
Conviction faces forward. It assumes there is a person you are becoming, measures the reaction against that person, finds a gap — and the gap is the point, because a gap is something you can close. Shame faces nowhere at all. It takes the reaction and freezes it into an identity. This is what you are. There is no gap to close, because there is no one to become.
Now go back to the five sentences. Every one of them is shame. Every one has stopped facing forward.
why this one is so hard to catch
Because the people saying these sentences believe they are being convicted. They think the sentence is God’s voice. They think the crushing weight is holiness, and that if they could only feel bad enough for long enough, something would finally shift.
It never does, and it is not supposed to. Weight is not the mechanism. Turning is. A grief that produces no movement is not a more serious repentance; it is a different thing wearing repentance’s clothes, and Paul says plainly where it ends.
If you have been waiting to feel sufficiently terrible before you are allowed to move, you are not being rigorous. You are stuck, and you have given the stuckness a religious name.
one thing you can do this week
Catch one sentence and put a question mark on the end of it.
When you hear yourself say I should be further along, do not argue with it and do not agree. Ask it one thing: which direction is this facing?
If it names a gap between what you did and who you are becoming, stay with it. That one is going somewhere, and it is worth the discomfort.
If it names a fact about you that admits no gap and offers no next step, you have identified shame, and you are allowed to stop cooperating with it. Not by feeling better about yourself. By noticing that it made a ruling it has no standing to make.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC, has spent her career across from people being seen at the worst possible moment. Exposed but Not Abandoned: What Pressure Reveals and What Grace Makes Possible takes each of the five sentences apart in turn, and gives you the language to tell conviction from shame in the moment.