So, a couple years ago, I got this letter from a young woman and she described, she said

that when she was in high school, she had gotten addicted to a number of substances, but

one of the things she got addicted to, she got addicted to heroin and her senior year

of high school, and this kind of marked her whole high school experience, very different

than my high school experience. She said that her senior year, she almost died from an overdose

of heroin. She found herself in the hospital just alone and broken and just so full of,

I guess, you say like this, so full of shame because as I can kind of make a joke, I was

not my high school experience, she could not make that joke. She would look at herself

and say, this is my high school experience, not only that, not only was this my high school

experience. She wrote this letter to me, this is how people from my high school knew me.

I was the girl who was the addict, I was the girl who our senior year almost died from

an overdose of heroin. And she was thinking about that, like I think about those moments

in our lives, I think the way that we want to oftentimes, the way we want to be remembered

is through like the shining moments, right? Like you won whatever the thing was, you did

that thing, you pulled it off, those moments of victory, those moments were like, yeah,

you came out on top. And too often I think our lives are defined by not our shining moments,

but by our moments of shame. All we see ourselves is not again by our shining moments, not

by those moments of victory, not by those moments where we actually did the right thing,

but by those moments when we failed, for those moments where we fell, by those moments,

that everyone is going to remember our shame, unless something changes. And too often our

lives become defined by our shame, unless something changes. Which is one of the reasons I

was reflecting on this story, this letter, this girl wrote to me because of the gospel

...