The Lies That Wore My Name

How shame dressed itself in my own voice — and what God said instead

📖 *“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because the Lord has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” — Isaiah 61:1 (NKJV)*

🕯️ There are moments when you think you’ve walked through a door, closed it quietly behind you, and moved on. And then — without warning — you find yourself back in the doorway, hand on the frame, realising the room wasn’t quite empty after all.

That was last night for me.

I was sitting with ClaudeAI, of all things, working on the landing page for my book. The 7 🗝️ Keys to Healing 💔heARTs💖 book. My book. The one I’ve been carrying in my bones for longer than I sometimes dare admit. The one I shrugged off every time someone suggested I should write it. I was trying to polish a paragraph — just words on a screen — and suddenly I wasn’t editing anymore. I was excavating.

I began listing them. The things I told myself I couldn’t do. The abilities that had been touched by pain, silenced by shame and surrendered somewhere along the way as evidence that I simply wasn’t “that kind of person.”

🎶 I couldn’t sing.

Except I sang in choirs. I wanted to become a singer. It wasn’t my voice that was lacking — it was my belief in it.

💃🏻 I couldn’t dance.

Except I loved to dance. Deeply, freely, with my whole body. It wasn’t that I couldn’t — it was that hubby dear wasn’t fond of it, and so I suppressed it. Quietly. Completely. I hid behind the lie until the lie became something I fully believed.

✍️ I couldn’t write anything worth reading.

Except I’ve spent a lifetime writing blogs and journals, walking people through the very valleys I’d just climbed out of myself. Except I have sixty-six poems sitting on a shelf, hidden away for decades, as if they were contraband rather than testimony.

🎨 I couldn’t paint.

Except my hands painted fabric and turned it into heirloom quilts — real, tangible, beautiful things — that my two sons, my nephew, and my three nieces still carry with them. Stitched with love. Stitched with me.

The evidence was always there. I simply couldn’t see it through the lens of shame.

🎤 I certainly couldn’t speak anything worth hearing.

Except — oh, here it is. Here’s where it got its root. My stepfather used to say, whenever I opened my mouth: “Think before you speak.” Again and again and again, until eventually I did. I got stuck thinking. I stopped speaking altogether, because speaking had become dangerous. The voice that had something to say learned to doubt itself before the first word was formed.

Looking back, I can see how many of the other lies attached themselves to that same root. If every word had to survive scrutiny before it was spoken, eventually silence felt safer than expression.

✏️ And I couldn’t draw.

I saved this one for last — not because it was the least but because it undid me the most. Because I had drawn. I’d spent most of my free time as a teenager drawing and colouring — lost in it, alive in it — until one day, when I was twelve years old, everything stopped. Someone violated what was sacred, and something in me simply shut down.

🕯️ By the time I reached drawing, the tears were rolling.

I felt the pain in my chest — real, physical, achingly familiar — and I had to stop. Just stop. Gather myself. Breathe. It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet, the way the deepest grief always is. The kind that catches you off guard in the middle of a Thursday night, while you’re trying to polish a paragraph.

Dang. I’ve still got to write those chapters. And this — all of this — is unravelling me.

📖 *“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3 (NKJV)*

🕊️ I thought I’d resolved this. I really did. I thought that when I picked up the keys and began walking in them — singing again, dancing again, writing and painting and speaking and yes, even drawing — I thought the wounds had been healed. Not just managed. Healed.

Maybe they have been, in part. Maybe the kintsugi work is further along than I realise. Broken pottery mended with gold doesn’t mean the cracks disappear — it means they are honoured, made beautiful, woven into the testimony of the piece rather than hidden from it.

🪨 The truth is this: some wounds have layers. You work through one, and the grace of God lets you rest for a season before He says, gently, firmly, with infinite tenderness — “Ready? There’s more.” Not more pain for pain’s sake. More freedom. More gold. More of the story that others need to hear.

✍️ I know this is part of the process. Each chapter I write isn’t just a chapter in a book — it’s a chapter in my own continuing healing. I can’t write about the keys without walking through the doors they unlock. That is, perhaps, exactly as it should be.

🌱 So here I sit, with tear-stained cheeks and a quiet kind of knowing. The weeping won’t last. The morning is already coming. God didn’t lead me this far to abandon me in the middle of the manuscript — He led me here because the manuscript needs what only my full healing can give it.

**💡 Reflection:**

• Which creative gift have you quietly told yourself you “can’t” do — and where do you think that lie first took root? 🤔
• Have you ever suppressed a joy to keep peace with someone else? What did that cost you over time? 🤔
• Is there a wound you thought was healed, only to find it still has something to say? What might God be inviting you toward in that tenderness? 🤔
• When you look at the things you have created — quilts, poems, songs, words — what do they tell you about who God made you to be? 🤔
• What would it mean to let your tears be part of the writing, rather than something to gather yourself from before you begin? 🤔

**🎺 Affirmation:**

I am not defined by the lies that once wore my name. I am a creative, gifted, Spirit-breathed image-bearer of God, and every silenced song, every hidden poem, every suppressed dance belongs to a story that is being redeemed. The keys were always in my hands. The doors are opening. I am held, I am healing, and I am His.

**🙌 Prayer:**

Lord, You see the tears that fell last night — not as weakness, but as worship. You see the twelve-year-old who stopped drawing, the young woman who stopped singing, the voice that got stuck thinking rather than speaking. You see every layer of this unravelling, and You are not alarmed by any of it.

I bring You the wounds that still have something to say. I bring You the chapters I haven’t written yet, and the places in me that need to be healed before I can write them with any honesty. I ask You to meet me there — in the drawing, in the dancing, in the speaking — and to do what only You can do: bind up what is broken, restore what was stolen, and turn every crack into a place where Your gold shows through.

Make this book an act of healing — in me, and in every reader who one day holds it. Let my testimony be their permission. Let my gold be their hope.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.