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love

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Ashamed and Shameless

Without a sense of how to become free from shame, we’re living in a culture settling for shamelessness instead. It’s a poor substitute. To be shame-free means shame no longer has any hold on you—it doesn’t interfere with how you hear others, doesn’t muddy your relationships, doesn’t challenge the decisions you need to make, doesn’t shape the way you perceive yourself, and doesn’t influence how...

Shhhhhhhame

Shame hurts. And when you’ve done something wrong, that’s a good thing. Like all pain, it’s meant to tell you something’s amiss and needs attention. When a splinter enters a person’s hand, pain sensors alert the person that there’s a problem by making the hand hurt. When the splinter’s removed, the wound is cleaned, and the cells regenerate, the hand no longer hurts. Likewise, when shame is...

God Doesn’t Want to Use You

If this sounds disappointing or discouraging to you, pause for a moment and consider this question: Do you think God wants you to use him? The desire to be used by God sounds good on the surface. Noble even. But it’s not what He’s after. This is good news because at our core, we don’t want to be used. We want to be loved. We want our work to matter to someone because we matter to them. We want...

Ms. Grumpy and Me

All I did was ask for half caff. Our waitress glanced toward the kitchen miserably, like I’d just added an hour’s worth of work to her day. I looked around at the spattering of others in the restaurant (hardly a rush); then, when she walked away, I leaned across the table and whispered to my friend, “She’s a grump.” Maybe. But this was also an opportunity for me, and I missed it. Two days later I...

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