> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.humanacre.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # RISE AND WALK - URL: https://www.humanacre.com/rise-and-walk/ - Published: 2026-09-10T09:04:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T09:04:31.000Z - Author: Niall Maxwell ***On shame, forgiveness and returning to aliveness*** A while ago, a woman asked me why I believed I was a sinner. We were speaking through the glow of our phones, trying to pass something delicate between us without crushing it beneath old words. I said that we are all sinners. She said she was not. She would have to believe in sin, she told me, before she could be a sinner. I understood the recoil. The word *sin* carries centuries of cold stone, wagging fingers and frightened children. It has been used to tell people that something is fundamentally wrong with them, that they are stained at the centre and must spend their lives apologising for being human. She told me her body closed when she heard phrases such as *I am a sinner* and *I need Jesus to save me*. That instinct is not foolish. Language remembers what has been done with it. The body remembers too. I have known shame from the inside. I know how it lowers the eyes and tightens the chest. How it turns something we have done into something we are. Shame does not simply say, *you missed the mark*. It says, *you are the miss*. It binds the mistake to the body and then calls the paralysis repentance. But paralysis repairs nothing. The Greek word translated as sin, *hamartia*, is commonly rendered as missing the mark. If there is a mark, there must be something worth aiming towards. I believe that mark is love. Not love as appetite, sentiment or personal preference. Love as the willingness to serve what is genuinely good, even when doing so costs us something. If there is a truer and more loving way to live, then human life has a direction. And if it has a direction, we will sometimes turn away from it. We will miss. To call myself a sinner is not to say that sin is my essence. I believe I am made from and for love. But powerful forces move within me: fear, anger, hunger, pride, the instinct to protect myself at another’s expense. I know where these forces can take me. I have lived the consequences. Acknowledging this is not self-hatred. It is humility. It prevents me from placing all darkness outside myself, where it can conveniently become somebody else’s fault. Yet shame can feel morally serious. Remaining wounded can feel like payment. We fear that forgiveness means getting away with something, that if the burden is lifted too quickly then the harm has not been honoured. But forgiveness does not say that nothing happened. It does not erase consequence or remove the need to repair what can be repaired. It says that the worst thing we have done will not be permitted to become the whole truth about us. When Jesus met the paralysed man, he forgave him and told him to rise, take up his mat and walk home. He did not ask the man to remain on the ground as evidence of remorse. Forgiveness came first. Movement followed. Perhaps that is what frightens us. If shame has become a shelter, forgiveness calls us out of it. If we are no longer required to keep punishing ourselves, then we must begin living. The heart trembles at the thought. There is fear in it, but also excitement, and perhaps regret for the years already surrendered. I have become wary of the word *purity*. It can sound bloodless and sterile, as though becoming good requires cutting away everything unruly and difficult within us. I am more interested in wholeness. To be whole is to hold all of yourself and say: *I am this, too.* Not to approve of every impulse or obey every part, but to stop exiling what belongs to us. Only what is acknowledged can be directed. Only what is held can be brought towards love. For me, Jesus has become the mark. I do not mean this as a sales pitch or a verdict against anyone else’s life. I mean that when I look at him, love is no longer an abstraction. It has a face, a voice, a body and a way of moving through the world. And when I cannot find my own way back, I no longer have to carry the entire burden alone. There is a presence beyond me and within me that can help return me to love. This is what salvation has begun to mean to me. Not that I am bad, but that I can become lost. Not that I am powerless, but that my own power is sometimes insufficient. Not that I must remain ashamed, but that I am being asked to rise. Sin is missing the mark. Repentance is re-aiming. Jesus is the mark. Wholeness is bringing all of myself into the aim. I can do better. More importantly, I want to. I want to come closer. Perhaps forgiveness is not the door through which the guilty escape. Perhaps it is the door through which the living return. The mat remains behind us. The road opens ahead. And the heart, still trembling, begins to walk.