"I don’t want to brag, but I’m pretty awesome at applying Band-Aids. And make no mistake, there is an art. Because if you go too quickly and unpeel them
the wrong way, they stick to themselves and you end up with a wadded-up useless
mess instead of the Little Mermaid –festooned bandage your daughter so
desperately wants to apply to a boo-boo that may in fact be 100% fictional.
Half of the injuries I treat at the Acuff house are invisible or simply
wounds of sympathy. My oldest daughter,
L.E. will scrape her knee and my three-year-old, Mcrae, realizing the Band-Aid
box is open will say, “Yo Dad, I’d like to get in on that too. What do you say we put one on, I don’t know,
my ankle. Yeah, my ankle, let’s pretend
that’s hurt.”
But sometimes the cuts are real, like the day my five-year-old got a
scrape on her face playing in the front yard.
I rushed into the house and returned with a princess bandage. As I bent down to apply it to her forehead,
her eyes filled up with tears and she shrank back from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t want to wear that Band-Aid,” she replied.
“Why? You have a cut, you need a Band-Aid,” I said.
“I’ll look silly,” she answered.
Other than her sister and her mom, there was no one else in the
yard. None of her friends were over, cars
were not streaming past our house and watching us play, the world was pretty
empty at the moment. But for the first
time I can remember, she felt shame. She
had discovered shame. Somewhere,
somehow, this little five-year-old had learned to be afraid of looking
silly. If I were smarter, if I had been
better prepared for the transition from the little toddler to little girl, I
might have asked her this:
“Who told you that you were silly?”
I didn’t though. That question
didn’t bloom in my head until much later, and I didn’t understand it until I
saw God as a similar question in Genesis 3:11.
To me, this is one of the saddest and most profoundly beautiful verses
in the entire Bible. Adam and Eve have
fallen. The apple is a core. The snake has spoken. The dream appears crushed. As they hide from God under clothes they’ve
hastily sewn together, he appears and asks them a simple question:
“Who told you that you were naked?”
There is a hurt in God’s voice as he asks this question, but there is
also a deep sadness, the sense of a father holding a daughter that has, for the
first time ever, wrapped herself in shame.
Who told you that you were not enough?
Who told you that I didn’t love you?
Who told you that there was something outside of me you needed?
Who told you that you were ugly?
Who told you that your dream was foolish?
Who told you that you would never have a child?
Who told you that you would never be a father?
Who told you that you weren’t a good mother?
Who told you that without a job you aren’t worth anything?
Who told you that you’ll never know love again?
Who told you that this was all there is?
Who told you that you were naked?
I don’t know when you discovered shame.
I don’t know when you discovered that there were people who might think
you are silly or dumb or not a good writer or a husband or a friend. I don’t know what lies you’ve been told by
other people or maybe even by yourself.
But in response to what you are hearing from everyone else, God is still
asking the same question, “Who told you that you were naked?”
And he’s still asking us that question because we are not.
In Christ we are not worthless
In Christ we are not hopeless.
In Christ we are not dumb or ugly or forgotten.
In Christ we are not naked.
In Isaiah 61:10 it says, “For he has clothed me with garments of
salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.”
The world may try to tell you a thousand different things today. You might close this book and hear a million
declarations of what you are and who you’ll always be, but know this.
As unbelievable as it sounds and as much as I never expected to type this
sentence in a book:
You are not naked." I am completely guilty of believing these lies. The funny thing is, I can't even remember ANYONE telling me any of these things, however I believed some of them as if people had been hurling them at me. Shame is absolutely the tool of the enemy. Now I will be the first to admit that I am not worthy God's grace....but isn't that the definition of grace? Something that is given despite your inadequacies. Please don't misunderstand, it is a good and healthy thing to accept the fact that we have fallen short. If we didn't, if we forced ourselves to believe we are good enough, we wouldn't accept the grace that is so valuable. We wouldn't know a love that blows our ability to understand clean out of the water. But there's a thin line between admitting you need a Savior and falling prey to the belief that you are damaged goods, so much so that you are of no value to God.
So why do I struggle with this so much? The Bible is full of evidence that Christ's love is complete. It was demonstrated through the ultimate act of sacrifice. Why do I believe that I would fall outside that blanket of love? The answer, though surprising, is simple: Sin. Arrogance. To THINK that my shortcomings are one too many to keep me the affections of Christ. Where do I get off? This arrogance makes me so susceptible to allow the enemy to increase these thoughts. So maybe the question, in my case, should be "Why do you insist on being naked?" Because let's be honest...it's just awkward for me an everyone around me.
