One Sunday at church, a woman named Ann showed up. From the start, it was clear that her life had been shredded up by hard living. Ann explained to our greeters that she was in recovery from an opioid addiction (specifically, heroin), to which the needle streaks and scars on her arms gave witness. She was barely 30-days sober.

The people at the rehab center had encouraged her to “add religion” to her life because religious involvement tends to decrease the chances of relapse.

On her way to the worship service, Ann dropped her two boys off at the nursery. When she returned after the service, a woman named Jane broke some bad news to her. During the service, Ann’s two boys had been aggressive with several of the other children and broke several of the toys. Humbly, Jane said to Ann, “I’m so sorry to tell you all this, but I thought that as the boys’ mother, you would want to know.”

Impulsively, Ann responded by yelling a cuss word in front of several children and parents.

What happened next caused my heart to sink. First, silence. Next, an embarrassed, burning blush rising to Ann’s face. Then, Ann walking the walk of shame from the nursery and out the door, forlorn and beaten down—no doubt for the umpteenth time in her life—by the shame and regret and the familiar feeling of failure.

It would be easy for our church to recover from this nursery incident with Ann and her boys. But would Ann recover? Could Ann recover from the shame that she carried out the door—the shame of a mother and recovering addict who took a risk, went to church, and bellowed an obscenity in front of all the children? Sadly, probably not.

But Jane had an idea. What if she could reassure Ann in the same way that the angel of the risen Jesus reassured the once-demon-possessed Mary Magdalene and the coward-betrayer Peter (Romans 16:1-8)? What if, roughly 2,000 years after the fact, the resurrection story could be re-enacted with life-giving, shame-reversing, community-forming words delivered not by an angel, but this time by Jane, the nursery worker?

This is an adapted excerpt from Irresistible Faith: Become the Kind of Christian That the World Can’t Resist by Scott Sauls.