Fear of Failure, Fear of Shame
If you're waiting to not feel ashamed anymore, you may be waiting a while.
It happened again. It’s been an anniversary week complete with a lot of negative emotions and self-hate. A year has passed, and I’m not happy with where I’m at in life. Then, on Tuesday, I got some very upsetting news that I felt like set me back even more from my goals. I didn’t respond well. I didn’t react in a mature way. Instead, I spiraled out of control in a matter of hours. The next morning, I gave into temptation by making a plan to end my life and began saying goodbye to friends. I upset them. I upset my family.
I feel very ashamed.
Shame is a powerful emotion, and it’s one that I’ve been acquainted with for a long time. Guilt, shame’s hideous cousin, is also a powerful emotion. Guilt (at least as I define it) is the sense of debt one feels from moral failure. I owe God. I am guilty. I feel guilt because I have sinned.
Shame, on the other hand, has to do with exclusion from a group. Because I have sinned, I do not feel welcome or accepted by friends, spouse, children, parents, church members, etc. Like guilt, shame is crippling. But even after a person stops feeling guilty, they can feel shame for far longer.
I know I do.
My biggest source of shame isn’t just my sin per se. It’s my failure. It’s my failure as a Christian. As a man. As a husband. As a father. As a minister. As a son. As a brother. As a friend.
I cannot tolerate failure. Not at all. And because I have failed so miserably in life, I feel immense shame that I haven’t been able to shake. That’s why I continue to struggle with suicide. Let me make it very plain:
I fear failure more than I fear death.
That may sound silly or absurd to some of you. Honestly, it sounds absurd to a part of me. The cerebral, rational part of myself. But it’s how I feel. I am deathly afraid of failure.
And it is my shame over my past failure that I struggle to most past.
Several months ago, I found myself contemplating the sins and fates of Judas and Peter. Both betrayed or denied the Lord. But one hung himself in shame for what he had done, while the other found a way to move forward to repentance and redemption. What proved to be the difference? What did Peter have that Judas did not?
I posed this question to one of my mentors. His response arrested me, then confused me. He said, in effect, that Judas ran to an unmerciful high priest. Having just finished a book on Hebrews, that response arrested me as one would imagine.
But then I was confused. I certainly believe Jesus is a merciful high priest. So why was I still struggling with shame? Why did it seem so crippling?
It wasn’t until this past Wednesday, in the tortured aftermath of almost taking my life again, that it clicked. I believed Jesus was a merciful high priest. But I didn’t trust him. Jesus being a merciful high priest was an intellectual acknowledgment and nothing more.
When it comes to moving beyond shame, I have been waiting to feel unashamed. And it hasn’t happened. And the reason it hasn’t happened is that faith can’t be lived out on emotion. If faith is the assurance of hoped-for things, we won’t always feel what we have faith in. It’s just not how faith works.
Moving forward, I need to grow in my confession that Jesus not only bore my guilt for my sin, but he also bore my shame for it also. I must acknowledge Jesus as a merciful high priest and live as if it is so regardless of how I feel in the moment. I must acknowledge that God has sworn an oath on this very thing. “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever” (Heb. 7:21).
And there’s good news for those who live by faith in that sworn oath: “God is not ashamed to be called their God” (Heb. 11:16).
It seems the antidote for shame is faith. Faith that Jesus has paid our penalty AND invited us into a group of fellow forgiven people. A group of people who have also unloaded their shame and surrendered it to a merciful high priest.
And it’s in the warm embrace of such a community, with a merciful high priest at its head, that we discover every failure is actually a new beginning.
I’m still afraid of failure as I type these words. I still feel some shame and I’m afraid of it too. But I’m determined to exchange my fear for faith.
Faith in a merciful high priest.