Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes.
But wouldn’t we just love them to?
If I could just put a bandage in the form of burying my feelings over my gaping emotional wounds, I could walk through this heavy but amazing life so much faster.
We all know how that turns out though. My husband will leave dirty dishes in the sink on the wrong day, or someone will say something ridiculous on social media, or someone will cut me off in carpool, and boom! Like a volcano, I’ll explode all over the never suspecting little villagers who didn’t see the sleeping giant starting to rattle.
Those tiny inconveniences are never the real issue. But pain, shame, and trauma are just looking for a good trigger. The Band-Aid couldn’t hold it all in, and I’m left bleeding all over the people closest to me.
Shame is a cruel thing. Whatever has brought on that painful feeling - last weekend’s decisions, affairs, abortions, failures, abuse, parent wounds - whenever not dealt with, end up triggering us to more behaviors that cause even more shame.
Shame is a sneaky devil.
But we don’t want to be that person. The one who blows up, even if it’s only in front of a few family members who witness it. Or the one who retreats from life because we’ve labeled ourselves not good based on what we’ve done or what has been done to us. We feel shame over all of it.
But we have to stop hiding and start the process of healing.
There’s this story in John 5 of a disabled man who was lying by a pool of water he believed would heal him. But he never got in. The hurting people around him kept skipping him in line to be the first to the healing water while he just kept waiting and remained hurt. Jesus saw that he had been there for a long time and asked the man, “Do you want to get well?”
We’ve got to ask ourselves the same question - do we even want to be healed from whatever is causing our shame? Because it takes work to get well. The disabled man would have to actually get up and make a move to be healed. But like him, we’re just lying around waiting on the miracle.
Sometimes Jesus puts his hand on our shoulder and just says, yeah, we’re about to go there. I want to heal this part of you, and it’s time to deal with this. It’s time to deal with this attitude, deal with this hard heart, deal with this brokenness, deal with this issue from your past that causes shame, guilt, and condemnation.
He brings light to our issues to begin the healing. And the exposure hurts at first; we’d much rather keep it buried in the dark. But if we stop the process, we’ll end up limping through life with Band-Aids over our bullet holes.
We have to risk the pain of the healing process to gain freedom from shame. The only way to truly heal is to ask God to first reveal what we’ve buried deep down and to give us the grace to do the hard work to let it bubble up and eventually get completely out of our body. And the hard work can often start with talking through our stuff in therapy and with a community centered around Jesus.
I’m over the Band-Aids. T-Swift was right - they don’t work. And they leave weird glue remnants on my skin.
Do you want to get well? The call of Jesus is for us to get unstuck from that toxic holding pattern and break free from shame.
My hope is that we won’t be scared of the work and ask him to start that journey with us today.
love,
vanessa