Trailer | Why Faith Shame Is So Personal To Me

In this special short video, I share why the Faith Shame series is not just a topic I am exploring, but a journey that has become deeply personal.

Over recent times, I have come to realise that many believers carry struggles they find difficult to talk about openly. Questions. Doubts. Disappointments. Regrets. Unresolved pain. Not because they lack faith, but because they fear how they might be perceived if they were completely honest.

For me, this became even more real following the passing of my mother. Grief has a way of uncovering emotions and questions we may not expect. It can challenge our assumptions about faith, strength and what it means to trust God in difficult seasons. It can also reveal how easy it is to suffer silently while appearing to be coping on the outside.

This is not a conversation about losing faith. It is a conversation about bringing our whole selves before God, including the parts we often feel tempted to hide.

Because healing begins where honesty becomes safe to share.

Thank you for joining me in the Word & Prayer Room. If this study has encouraged you, please follow the podcast and share it with someone who may be seeking God's direction. Remember, God is not distant or silent. He is able to make His will known to those who sincerely seek Him. Until next time, keep listening for His voice, keep trusting His word, and keep walking by faith. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Good evening, I'm Sylvia Stevenson, and welcome to this explanation video about my new Faith Shame Teaching Series. You know, it's really important for us to be able to have real conversations, and when I say real conversations, I'm talking about the types of topics that don't typically come up in everyday life, especially around our church family. Now, over the past few weeks, I've been really focused on what this teaching series should actually be all about, and I really feel that this is a good time to talk about it. On the 6th of June 2025, my mother died. She died at the age of 99 years and eight months, and it was sad, it was sad for everyone. And I don't necessarily grieve her dying so much because actually, you know, 99 years is an amazing long life. She was just four months of a hundred years, but I think what I what I struggled with was how she died. Um I just felt that knowing my mom, she would never have wanted to have been in the state that she was in. I felt it was a very sad sight, a sad way for her to die. And so that really impacted me, not so much her death, but how she died. Um it was it was very hard. And after that period of going through the funeral and all the planning and everything like that, I think I didn't give myself enough time to grieve and to understand the loss. And I think until we experience you know something like the death of someone, we don't really know how we're gonna respond. But I know I went through a really dark place, a place that was so intense, and I began to question my faith because around me I just saw people striving in their faith, and I felt ashamed. I didn't want to say to people, I don't really feel like praying, I'm perhaps angry with God allowing my mom to die the way she did, and that's a hard thing to confess, right? And so I ended up keeping everything in and trying to block my mind out of the pain, the intense pain that I was experiencing, and I think one of the most acute moments was just feeling that actually I'm really hurting, I'm in a really difficult place, and I don't know that anyone really notices it. And that's not true. There were a couple of people who knew that I wasn't myself, probably people sensed it from afar off. Um, but you know, you know, going through that and people approaching me probably was very difficult. I know I'm probably not the most approachable, not because I'm a mean person, but probably because people think that I'm a nonsense and may find it difficult to approach me, especially on a matter like this. Well, what I realized was just how broken I was and how I felt about my faith. And there was a significant moment when I called my bishop and I said, I've got to tell you something. I think I'm backsliding. I look back and I smile now, but at the time I really believed it. The faith shame of how I was feeling as a Christian really made me clam up, and you know, the jury is out. Is it because people are gonna judge us? Is it because we expect ourselves to be stronger than we actually feel at that time, or is it that we judge others? Who knows? Um, so the Faith series is all about exploring what face shame is, why it occurs, or how it can occur, and really kind of digging into the nuances so that we can come up with how to recognize that it's happening, how to deal with ourselves, and how to reach out for help. Because you know, unless we reach out for help, we're going to just get stuck. So the new series is coming out on the 22nd of June. I am so delighted, and you will be able to watch that from the Word and Prayer Room podcast, and I'm also hopefully going to be doing some interviews and some different things with people just to talk about some of the things that we're going through. So I really hope that you enjoy the series, engage with the series, and more than anything else, that if you are experiencing faith, shame, a dark time in your life where your faith may be under pressure and where you feel you might be judged for how you're feeling, then maybe faith shame is just for you. Listen, we're calling it out. No more shame because Jesus took our pain. I'm Sylvia Stevenson. Join me soon on the Word and Prayer Ring podcast.