Exposure for most of us is not welcomed. Its possibility creates images of pointing fingers and wagging tongues while our inner person shrinks with the presumed embarrassment or intimidation that will be heaped on us, at the least. When a threatened exposure could reveal the shameful secrets we carefully guard, then its possibility is foreboding with a sense of assault, weighty punishment, and forced isolation. It is that seeming shredding of my personhood and loss of all that gives value to me as an individual.

 

Embarrassing moments and personality quirks aside, consider solely an exposure of those secrets that have been taken to the cross of Christ and cleansed with the costly blood of His sacrifice. Grace has wrapped the secret in its benevolence and set it apart from the one it once identified. No longer does that secret reveal who I am because who I am, is now who I am in Christ, totally cleansed and wholly righteous. But still the secret is there. Maybe it was an abortion. Maybe it was an affair. Perhaps an addiction or a legal entanglement. Or perhaps it had more to do with angry, repetitive reactions or the neglect of responsibilities that I ran from. Whatever it was, it has been forgiven. Whatever it was, is no longer mine to own. And yet I am so aware that others are not as grace-filled as God is, and I still fear their scrutiny. Guilt can be gone, while shame still lingers.

 

Listen carefully though. The shame belongs to the secret and not to me. Yes, there are secrets that will always be shameful because of their nature – they were wrong when I participated in them and their wrongness has not changed. What has changed is that they no longer define me. What has changed is that God no longer holds them against me. What God sees is the purity that has replaced the secret. I am not going to suggest that the secrets of our past be indiscriminately paraded or posted – so doing can bring needless pain from those who know nothing of God’s grace and really don’t care to understand it. Those individuals sit smugly amidst their own self-righteousness.

 

There are those however whose shameful secrets haven’t found their way to the cross, and they are immersed in self-condemnation. They long for love and forgiveness, but their fear of a God they only see as punitive and exacting imprisons them with the shame of their secret. Sensitivity on your part and on my part to respond to the Spirit of God’s leading to, yes, expose our own secrets can many times be the means God uses to infuse that one with hope who has no hope. We may still in the moment fear that exposure, but our own secrets are redeemed when God uses our willingness to walk with another to the cross.