I was taking a walk around my RV park late tonight, praying about this painful place in my heart. A letter from the preschool about my daughter’s lack of potty training sent my heart reeling. Since my emotional response was bigger than it should’ve been for such a situation—she’s only two, and her potty training is still regressed because of her whole life turning upside down three months ago—I knew I had some underlying wound that was being triggered.
I prayed and prayed, followed spontaneous thoughts, feelings, and memories back in time until I got to what I believed was the source of the wound. Over one month ago, I hadn’t spoken up when my husband made a parenting choice which was against my conscience. Although he was within the bounds of God’s guidance, he was outside the bounds of my core belief system. In the name of being an agreeable coparent—because sometimes I am more critical than I should be—I didn’t push back. When a stranger suggested that his was a poor choice, shame washed over me like it has never washed over me before.
Was what my husband chose “wrong”? Not by God’s standards. So why did it open me up to shame—a demonic tactic—that took me out for months in this area? Because I didn’t have enough faith to make the same choice my husband did, and it caused distress in my heart, in my soul. The distress flooded my body with stress hormones that created a weakness in my spiritual armor, and demons of shame attacked the weak points in my defenses.
The Voice of Shame
This one thought has haunted me for over a month, and I haven’t been able to figure out why my regular dose of prayer and inner healing hasn’t worked. Tonight, I realized it was because I caused the wound against myself, because I sinned against my own conscience.
That Scripture About Conscience
The Bible has a few scriptures about a person’s conscience, but the one below is possibly the most contested and widely misunderstood:
The situation mentioned in the scripture is about whether a person should or should not eat meat sacrificed to idols, and how it is only sin if they do so against their own conscience (current core belief system). Did you get that? If you act in obedience to God’s ways to a degree that is beyond your current ability to trust in the goodness of God’s ways, you will actually WOUND your soul—and that is NEVER God’s will.
Applying That One Verse to My Life
Here’s my version of that scripture, as applied to my situation: “If Tenay is doubting the goodness of Brett’s parenting choice, but goes along with it anyway [because she recognizes it is godly], then she becomes open to [demonic attacks of] judgment, because she went along with it without trusting it, and everything that she does without trust creates something in her that’s not-a-part-of-her-design [a wounded soul].”
This is a BIG reason why God transforms most people’s belief systems before God invites them into acts of obedience. This process can be very slooooooow, especially when God is seeking to undo some life-long beliefs. God doesn’t want to WOUND us in the name of making us holy. If we believe in the depths of our heart that something God wants us to do is wrong (due to false teaching, limiting cultural norms, or fear habits), then God will usually not ask us to act against our beliefs. First, God will put us in situations to discover that our beliefs may be more fallible than we thought. Eventually, when we lose trust in our beliefs, God can ask us to trust him/herself over our past beliefs in that area.
A Prayer of Repentance
When I realized all of this during my late walk around the RV park, I asked God to heal my heart from my own wounding, and asked God’s help to not sin against my conscience again. Then, I saw God’s hand reach into my heart and pull out sludge; after that, God fill up the cavern in my heart with a light of Hope. That’s when I began to feel the pain subside.
“Now that you’re being healed, you can begin to coparent with Brett in trust,” said God.
May it be so, amen!