Dry The Tears, Fix Your Crown: Reclaiming Confidence from the Grip of Condemnation, Shame & Regret

By Gloria Owusu

You’re unforgivable and worthless, God doesn’t love you and can’t do anything with you.

You’re too much of an embarrassment and of course you made those mistakes, you are one.

You blew it last time and it’s too late to try again.

Do any of these thoughts sound familar? Sh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gloria Owusu
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781999266301

Book preview

Contents

So, Now You Think You’re Better Than Me?

The Goodness of the Gospel

The Necessity for Deliverance

Hated in Hell

The Ultimate Plot

A Contrite Heart vs. A Contract with Shame

Forgiven to Forgive

On The Mend

Renounce Regret

There is a People

Submit to God

Expressions of Submission

Prayer

Fasting

Bible Study

Worship

Community

Calling Preparation

Service to God

Giving

We Don’t Talk to Serpents, We Crush Them

Invisible Warfare

Remember Who You Are

Eyes on the Prize

Our Source of Confidence

Suggested Books

Shame, Rejection

Disordered Sexuality

Understanding Identity

Prologue

In 2010, I saw something unforgettable during prayer. It was of a young woman who had her eyes gouged out, and in their place was a strange dullness. She was sitting in a dingy, unlocked jail cell. She was sitting down with broken shackles on her wrists and ankles. They weren’t chained to anything, but there she sat with the cuffs in a strange obligation, full of despair.

Remember: the door was unlocked.

She looked like a zombie. Her skin was ashen, she looked emaciated and malnourished. Somehow, I could look into her heart, and it looked like a dimming light. She had bodyguards, barely paying attention to her but at the same time hovered over her like a dark presence. If she wanted to, she could have gone free. But she didn’t. She seemed to be weighed by her environment and felt like she had no right to leave. The problem was, even if she chose to leave, she had no ability to have insight for direction since she had no eyes.

She was trapped.

When I came out of the vision, I was bewildered, asking God what the heck I just saw. Some of what He told me concerning its interpretation was personal. As I continued to meditate, He showed me it was a picture of people who have been under the close surveillance of condemnation and shame, rather than being followed by grace, goodness and mercy. The vision reminded me of Samson, a man who was sent on earth with a specific mission: to be a deliverer to his people. He was given to his parents by God with instructions for His upbringing. He was consecrated, or set aside for a certain assignment, until he became distracted by Delilah, a Philistine woman he shouldn’t have gotten to know in the first place. Her association with him cost his eyes and his slavery to the Philistines, until God restored his strength. I encourage you to read Judges 13-16 to read his story in detail, and we’ll talk more about him soon.

Within my personal journey, I have been enslaved by soul cycles of lust, rejection, abnormal sadness, instability, trauma and regret. I can candidly say that I have allowed my sobriety to be kidnapped by temporary satisfaction.. I would turn into that zombie woman, going back into garbage cans to scrounge for scraps when I could have just taken my seat to eat at my Father’s table. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a place, it was that I wasn’t confident of my place to occupy it. When I finally would come back to my senses, I would loathe and hate the fact that I did it again - it being anything from sleeping or scrolling all day to masturbating to overthinking or remaining isolated.

God is faithful: He always provides a way of escape… whether it’s through the lyrics of the last worship song you heard playing in your ear as a way of God trying to speak, your finger slipping while looking through illicit hashtags on Instagram and suddenly you’re on your home page, that text from your sister/accountability that came through while watching an intensely sexual scene during a movie, that Facetime call from a friend to see that you’re okay… count those all to be ways of escape. But sometimes, we don’t want to escape our escape. Whenever we don’t allow ourselves to follow the route God is clearing by His love, our sobriety is taken hostage. It’s only until it gets momentarily satiated and wants to come back for seconds, thirds, fourths, and fifths that you realize that this cycle is dangerous.

The struggle you may be dealing with may not necessarily be the same as the ones I identified, and that is okay. As you read, I want you to think about a cycle of behaviour or actions that you have been trapped in. It could be related to a substance or it could be related to a person. Whatever it is brings you into distinct levels of shame and regret – you don’t want to see anyone or even talk to anyone about because you feel like what you did or are doing is tattooed onto your skin and legible in the pupils of your eyes. Whatever it is that makes you feel like if anyone was to just look at you, they’d know immediately what you’ve been doing… and you just don’t want to have that risk of being caught.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, Where are you? So he said, I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself. - Genesis 3:8-10

Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden because they were aware that something had changed within them when they disobeyed God and instantly, they thought about a strategy to ‘protect’ themselves by creating a distance with Him. Then in hiding from ourselves and attempting to hide from God, the self-loathing begins.  There’s nothing like that thought of "you, of all people, knew better than this, why the heck are you here?!"

Sound familiar? It’s time for things to change.

In this book, we’re going to confront condemnation, shame and regret, the demonic bodyguards keeping you and your purpose in an unlocked jail cell with zero visual clarity. I believe that condemnation and shame are the silent assassins that keeps people who have been given a specific assignment and call of God from operating strongly in it. They loom like a cloud of nostalgia over your heart and mind, making you feel like you are inadequate or unworthy to leave your past behind. On the contrary: you’ve already received not only Heavenly permission, but Heavenly commission to move in who you’ve been called to be.

We’re going to dive into the weapon of condemnation and why it exists, we’ll examine motivations of self-protection, we’ll look into what true conviction looks like, our identity in Christ, changing the channel of the enemy’s lies and actively live in submission to God. We’ll look at why the enemy wants you to remain in grief about your sin and the truth of how God sees sin… as well as what God gives you in mercy despite how you may feel about your sin.

I’m in the mood to fix crowns and dry tears. If you’re ready to do both, so am I, girl. Let’s go.

Be Careful, It’s Contagious

One of the trademarks of my being alive is my experience with horrid cold winters. I shiver just thinking about it, but I’m very proud to say that I’ve survived 27 winters. Some were green, some were indeed white Christmases. Although I was born a Canadian, I am Ghanaian, West African by heritage and am proudly a citizen of both countries. There are a whole lot more days where I am more of an African than a Canadian, questioning myself as to why I was born in a place where the wind hurts