there is a more insidious version of nostalgia in negative: shame.13 Shame is a nefarious enemy of grace that thrives on the backward glance. Shame keeps craning our necks to look at our past with downcast eyes, as a life to regret. There are highly spiritualized forms of this fixation that parade themselves as holiness. But in fact this is the antithesis to grace. Shame lives off the lie of spiritual self-improvement, which is why my past is viewed as a failure. Grace lives off the truth of God’s wonder-working mercy—my past, my story, is taken up into God and God’s story. God is writing a
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