Restoring Honor Through Confession
by Sherry Varughese
I sit in a dimly lit room with women who share stories, some filled with shame, some of regret, some saturated with pain. Bottles and blades, innocence undone, haunting tales where a smile is a stranger, and hope is absent. I lean in and tell them they are brave. They are. They tell parts of their stories that they have never revealed before. Things that have happened to them. Things that they have done.
I am familiar.
I, too, grew up like most of our South Asian families and communities, burying my shame and displaying the social media version of me, hoping to be elevated with honor. Pretension and performance became the norm, and I became an expert at numbing and hiding.
Yet, as it often does, we cannot stand how triggers or reminders make us feel. It leaks out of us, distorted and destructive. Some of us lean on ways to escape through addictions or guilty pleasures, while some of us throw ourselves into performance and perfection, all the while using fig-leaf attempts to cover up our shame. I’ve done both.
However, our Creator did not wire us to hide. We were made to be known. So here in this room, in this little community of women, we recreate the Garden. We remind each other about our original design, the cross, and the One who is resurrection and life. Each week they show up, they stop pulling away and start to feel deep. I sit, and I cry with them. We face the brokenness together. For their own pain. For each other’s. They begin to discover that to be fully loved is to be fully known, and shame no longer gets the oxygen to breathe.
But how does refusing to hide restore honor?
In the Gospel of Luke, we discover a story about Jesus restoring a woman’s honor. He was on his way to heal the daughter of an honored synagogue leader but stopped for an unclean, bleeding woman, who was covered in shame. Yet this woman risked it all because she placed her trust in the only One who can heal. She attempts to reach Jesus, if only to touch the fringe of his robe, because if she were to touch anyone, they, too, would be named "unclean." So, as Luke describes it, she tries so hard not to be seen, probably because she’s lived for so long with her head down and pushed away. Yet here, Jesus stops. He turns. He sees her. Jesus publicly calls out for her, and he honors her. Though her shame is made known, it no longer gives her a name. Jesus calls this woman “daughter.” Once scorned for shame, she is now honored because of her faith.
What would it be like to have this faith? If we stepped into the light and came close to the One who promises to never leave? To approach Him instead of trying to hide the painful parts of ourselves, and entrust ourselves to the One who sees, knows, and still demonstrates His deep affection for us?
We’ll find that He calls us not only to confess privately to Him, but to one another too (James 5:16). He invites us to experience a transformation that reflects the relational intimacy of the Trinity, the very image we were made in. So when we share our stories with safe people, we open the door to leave isolation and fear. Love and connection bloom. The lying narrative begins to lose its power. Though many of us have been hurt in relationships, we begin to realize that we were created to find healing in them, too. Simply naming and confessing our broken pieces with those who choose to stay close is a step towards feeling known and loved. The incredible thing is that although shame entices us to hide, being known is what brings about His restored honor.
This is transformative healing. This is how God seeks to do His work, in and through imperfect people like you and me. He is eager to restore and redeem His original design in us and through us by the power of the resurrection, if we are willing to join Him in the journey. It may mean uncovering memories or reckoning with a family history we would rather hide. But we can embrace the courage He so freely offers us. We can trust that the broken pieces we bring will be held together by a God who offers an abundance of joy and freedom – the joy of having our honor restored and the freedom of living unashamed.
Sherry Varughese has served in pastoral ministry for almost two decades with her husband in New York. She has facilitated healing groups within the church as a trained trauma facilitator through Mending the Soul and completed an intensive pastoral counseling training program at Redeemer Counseling Services. Sherry is currently obtaining her license and degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, specializing in Trauma-Informed Therapy at Transformations Counseling Group in Long Island. She is committed to partnering in the Gospel work of reshaping fractured stories into whole, redeemed relationships with God, others, and within themselves.