Philip Babineaux, a longtime St. Charles Parish resident, begins his self-published book, ‘Honor Over Shame,” with his own personal story about shame.
The trauma of a childhood molestation, he writes, served as an anchor to recurring and embedded shame in his life.
“Before I had even formed a strong sense of self or a depth of knowing the Lord, I was suddenly wrestling with darkness and the shame that accompanied it,” Babineaux writes in his book, which was published in late December. “Was this my fault? Did I cause this to happen? Where was God at? Why wasn’t I protected? There was an immediate and cataclysmic shift in my life.”
Babineaux said the shame from the abuse consistently pulled that trauma into his present.
“Where guilt says this is what you did, shame says this is who you are,” Babineaux said. “Where guilt can be resolved, shame sticks around after the smoke clears.”
He said the trauma created a propensity for him to struggle in certain areas of his life.
“My identify really got moved off of who I am because of that experience,” he said.
Babineaux, a longtime ministry leader and a member of First Assembly of God Church, said the book is a deep dive into the origins of shame and why honor overthrows that shame.
“The book is a longtime coming,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. I have even started several manuscripts. Probably for 10-15 years, I’ve saved manuscripts, put them away and forgotten about them. But I would say in the summer of last year, I felt a strong push – you need to do this.”
When he finally sat down to write the book, he finished it in a year.
“It’s a topic that I’ve been sitting with for the last two years,” he said. “I’ve taught it, preached it. I’ve done men’s groups. I’ve taught this to recovering addicts. When it came time for me to write this book, it was already so developed in my heart.”
“Honor Over Shame,” which is listed as a quick read, is available for purchase on Amazon. Babineaux said it’s a compact, concise book. In the last five weeks, Babineaux has sold 120 books.
“I thought maybe I would sell about 75 books in the lifetime of the book,” he said. “It’s exciting.”
While his personal struggle through shame, and ultimately, to honor, motivated him to write the book, the book is not about the trauma he endured, Babineaux said. Instead, it’s a theological look of how shame is represented in the Bible starting in the Garden of Eden.
But his personal story, which he described briefly in the introduction of the book, has caught the attention of readers.
“The shocking thing to me is I am having people come up to me in tears,” he said. “They are telling me that it was the vulnerability of me sharing what I went through that caused them to realize ‘I have a lot of stuff in my life that I have carried.’”
Babineaux said he hopes the book is a revelatory experience with God for the reader and that readers read it with hope in their hearts.
“I do believe there is a place where freedom actually is freedom,” he said. “And that shame is something that can be defeated in our lives. I know I have experienced that in my life. It doesn’t look like I no longer think things and struggle with things. It looks like who I fundamentally believe I am aligns more with what God says than what shame says.”
When Babineaux faced his trauma in his adulthood, there was an awakening and a shift in his heart, he said.
“I was in the room again,” he said. “And I saw Jesus standing in the room weeping. He said ‘I was there on the worst day of your life. I was not away from you. I was not running for you. I was not ashamed of you. I was weeping for you.’ And then he said, ‘I was also weeping for the other person.’”
Babineaux said he found forgiveness.
“There is a propensity to hate and despise people who have hurt you,” he said. “It’s just not God’s heart.”
