Redemption from Shame: How God Transforms What We Hide

Editor’s note – Zack Duncan writes with the kind of honesty most of us reserve for a journal, not a public page. His story traces a lifetime of hiding a heart condition out of shame, and the slow, costly work of letting God into that hidden place instead of asking Him to simply remove it. We’re running this piece because so many of us carry something we’d rather manage privately than surrender – and because the gospel has something better to say to us than ‘be fixed.’ It has something to say about being made new.

I went to see my cardiologist two weeks ago.

There was nothing that filled me with more dread and loathing as a child. It was the annual event when medical professionals would run EKGs and echocardiograms, ponder over test results, and talk about my heart condition as if I wasn’t there.

I never paid all that much attention to what was said. I was only interested in one question: would this be the time I was finally allowed to play sports again?

The answer was always no.

That’s perhaps the bigger reason why I never seemed to “pay attention” in those visits. My mind went on a temporary hiatus so I didn’t have to grapple with the pain of perpetually disappointed hopes.

More Shame and Guilt

Last week I wrote about the difference between shame and guilt, and how our shame leads us to run from God rather than to Him.

That’s true whether it’s Adam and Eve hiding from God after their disobedience, or a toddler feeling horrified at the thought of her daycare teacher “telling Jesus” about the bad behavior in the classroom. We fear being exposed when we know our behavior doesn’t measure up.

And that can be true in places beyond our behavior as well.

For much of life, shame and guilt were all jumbled up for me as it related to my heart.

Shame, the voice that says I am bad, was subconsciously at work.

I was intensely aware of being different. When it came to my heart, I felt less like a person and more like a label. I felt like something to be pondered over by medical professionals.

But it wasn’t only shame. I also felt guilt, the feeling that says I’ve done something bad, in ways I couldn’t quite articulate back then.

I believed that God was real and that He could heal me. Or, more specifically, I believed He could convince my parents and doctors to let me play sports again. But as the years rolled by and those prayers were left unanswered, I felt the guilt that came from wondering if it was somehow my fault.

Had I not prayed hard enough? Read my Bible enough? Found the right Bible verse? Was I not following the formula correctly?

It was all false guilt based on lies, of course. But I felt vaguely guilty nonetheless.

With my shame and false guilt, I too resolved to hide. So after my doctors stopped me from competitive physical activity in middle school, I never talked with my friends about why I suddenly stopped playing sports. I was never honest about why I was sitting on the sidelines in gym class, what had previously been my favorite part of the school day.

Obviously everyone knew something major had changed, but exposing the source felt too painful.

Editor’s note – Shame and guilt feel like the same thing from the inside, but Scripture treats them differently. Guilt says “I did something wrong”; shame says “something is wrong with me.” Duncan’s account of feeling like “a label” rather than a person describes an experience many believers with chronic illness or disability carry silently for years.

Thoughts on God and the Heart

Over time, I adjusted my view on God.

Perhaps God wasn’t really loving. Maybe God actually wasn’t real. Or, maybe He was real, but just didn’t love me for some reason.

Thinking about it deeply didn’t seem to help.

I felt ashamed again when I got my implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD) the summer after graduating from high school. It was harder to hide with an implant bulging from under your clavicle.

In college, I still rarely talked about my condition, but the discomfort wasn’t so acute. There were less occasions for it to come up since I was no longer sitting uncomfortably on the sidelines in gym class.

But my outlook changed in a big way in 2014, the year I turned 30.

I was running the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race in Washington D.C. with my wife, and made it 9.8 miles before my heart went into a fatal rhythm and I lost consciousness.

My memory returns several hours after when I woke up in a hospital bed. I realized I would have been dead if it hadn’t been for my defibrillator that recognized the rhythm and applied therapy (defibrillation shock) to fix it.

I started to have a new outlook on my device that year.

That was also the same year I became fully convinced that God was real.

I wasn’t entirely sure if His reality was good news or bad news, but I knew with zero doubts that He existed and that He knew me.

Editor’s note – Seven years passed between that hospital bed and the first honest sentence Duncan wrote about it. That gap is worth noting: conviction didn’t arrive as a lightning strike but as a long, quiet pressure. That’s often how God works – patiently, underneath the surface, long before we’re ready to say anything out loud.

Fighting Shame (Without Knowing It)

Even though things had started to change, it would take seven more years before I truly shared anything about my heart. It was in 2021 when I wrote my first article on Medium.

I did not want to do this. But I felt convinced that God was calling me to do it.

Further, I was convinced that He was inviting me to share it on LinkedIn as well. I really hated that part. It meant more exposure of what I wanted to hide. But by this time in life I was also convinced that it was a good idea to follow His leading when I didn’t want to.

And so I wrote and published the article and shared it, even as I felt as though I was fighting against myself to do it.

It’s now five years after I first shared that article. And I can see now that God used it not only to get me writing again, but to change my outlook on shame.

As a child, I had wanted God to save me from shame by changing the source of what felt shameful. To “fix” me so I wouldn’t have to feel different.

Instead, He did it by leading me through what felt shameful. To experience the discomfort of feeling different and to realize that He would walk the path with me. And to begin to see that there is no condemnation and no shame for those who are in Christ (Romans 8:1).

I now see that this is a microcosm of how God works redemption and transformation in our lives.

And that leads me back to my cardiologist visit the other week.

The Ongoing Redemption in Following Jesus

The appointment last week was with the electrophysiologist’s office. They are the folks who handle the monitoring of my ICD.

My visit was with a new provider and I was immediately struck by her friendliness and compassion.

As it turned out, she knew a lot about having a device from her own life experience.

She was a former basketball player and body builder who had been diagnosed with a heart condition after starting her medical career. She received an implant to help her heart beat properly.

She told me how challenging it had been to adjust to life with a device. And she shared how her experience has helped her counsel patients. She’s even considering starting a support group that she could not just lead, but participate in as well.

As we talked I had a growing sense that she was a Christian. And I had an even stronger sense that I should ask her if I could pray for her, regardless of what her beliefs might be.

I had never before asked something like this in a doctor’s office. Yet I was pleasantly surprised to find myself unashamed to ask her if I could pray for her.

As it turned out, she was a Christian and was happy to receive prayer.

From Shame to New Life

As I prayed for God to continue to use her to be a blessing to her patients like me, I was struck by how different my cardiologist visits have become.

I was full of gratitude to God and was overwhelmed by His goodness. I was amazed by how He continually makes new life out of what had seemed dead.

When I was younger, I thought I would be safe and in control if I protected myself and hid what made me ashamed. But renewal comes as we give up control to the One who knows best. We are continually made new as we give over to Him the things that we are most desperate to protect.

The Christian life of taking up a cross and following can seem terrifying and difficult. But it’s not a life of resigned drudgery.

It’s a life of restoration as we continue to trust God more and more. In Christ, all things are made new.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. [Isaiah 43:19]

When I finished neither of us had dry eyes.

Wrapping Up

My heart condition had been a source of shame for so long. Now I am grateful for it.

If He had answered my prayer requests for divine healing back in middle school I would have enjoyed school more. But I wouldn’t have come to see how what I truly needed was Him, not the sense of validation that had come through sports. I wouldn’t have had the same chance to experience the transforming love that He offers when we trust Him.

I wouldn’t have seen firsthand how He takes our shame and replaces it with joy.

As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame” [Romans 10:11].

As we follow Him, God uses the things that had once been broken in us to continue His transforming work of redemption within us and in the world.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. [2 Corinthians 5:17-21]

Thank you, Jesus.

A Word from the Editor
Most of us have at least one thing we manage instead of surrender – a diagnosis, a past, a fear we’ve learned to hide well. Duncan’s story is a reminder that God rarely removes the thing we’re ashamed of; more often He meets us inside it, and uses it to make something we could not have built ourselves. “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame” (Romans 10:11) isn’t a promise that the hard thing disappears. It’s a promise about what God does with it.

Editor Comment: Zack Duncan's honesty about a lifetime of hidden shame is a gift to anyone quietly carrying something similar.

This article appeared on Medium and is reprinted with modifications and by permission.