Not Ashamed Is A Deliberate Sentence

They shut the road at six and by half past seven the table runs the length of it, and there is a man on a small speaker doing his best and a girl going up and down on a scooter through everybody's legs.

She is forty-one.

Nine years, and what it does is public. That is the specific thing. It is not a private illness that she manages at home and hides. It happens where people are, without warning, and it looks the way it looks, and there is no version of her life in which it stays between her and a doctor.

She has a system. She stands near a wall. She knows every place on this street with a step to sit on. She wears certain things because of what they hide and certain other things because of what they allow.

And the thing underneath the system, which she has never said to her husband or her mother or the woman who prays with her, is this.

She is ashamed of it. Not embarrassed, which is a smaller word and passes. Ashamed, which does not pass, and which has quietly extended itself, over about six years, into a conclusion about God: that He is holy, and this is undignified, and He must find her at least a little embarrassing, the way you can love somebody and still be relieved when they sit down.

If your body does something in public, you know the system, and you know the shame arrives before the thing has even finished happening.

Somebody thought it was worth writing down

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the nine years, though the nine years cost what they cost. It is the public part, which nobody chooses and which most people never have to think about. It costs you every street, in the sense that you have mapped every step on all of them. It costs your clothes, which are chosen against a list. It costs the shame, which is not embarrassment and does not pass. And it costs you a conclusion about God that you built quietly over six years and have never once said out loud to anybody.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your nine years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the shame has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking this street would be easier without you having to be managed at it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your husband, the woman who prays with you, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who shut a road and put a table down the middle of it.

Now, Hebrews 2, and ask why anybody would need to write this sentence down.

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.Hebrews 2:11

He is not ashamed to call them brethren.

Now, a sentence like that only gets written for a reason. Nobody writes down that a man is not ashamed of his own house. You write it when somebody in the room has a live suspicion in the other direction, and the writer is answering it.

Whoever that letter went to had a question about whether the holy one found them an embarrassment, and the writer thought it was important enough to answer in the text, in the negative, plainly.

You are being answered by a sentence somebody thought was worth putting in writing. Hebrews 2:11 says He is not ashamed to call them brethren, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that answer and lays it on a street with the road shut.

Now the ground he gives for it, because it is not sentiment. He does not say Christ is too kind to be ashamed of you. He says they are all of one, which is a statement about shared nature, and the whole surrounding passage is about Him taking on flesh and blood so that He shares what those He is naming share.

So the not being ashamed is not a graciousness He extends downward. It rests on the fact that He took the same kind of body, with all of what a body does, and the writer of Hebrews spends the next verses being remarkably specific about it.

You have a shared nature underneath the sentence rather than a kindness held over you. That is written into Hebrews 2:11 and the verses around it, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an argument that old land on a woman standing near a wall.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because six years of good things have already been said on that street.

It does not tell you the nine years are changing, and it makes no promise about your body in public or anywhere else, and I will not predict it, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you the shame is small or that you should simply stop. Shame does not go when it is argued with, and this page is not going to hand you a task.

And it is not a reward. There is no clause in that verse about having borne it well enough to be called brethren. The ground given is a shared nature, which was true before you were born.

You were never a thing He was being gracious about. Scripture says not ashamed and gives the reason as shared nature, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it down a road with a table in the middle of it.