honesty

You weren’t the only person, today, through whom this concept came to settle into my heart–to draw me into rumination.  But it was the most poignant…

I saw it in a movie… heard it echoed in your words, and the words of others, chewed on it in reflection of my week…

We–as humans… are drawn so irresistibly to raw, honest, vulnerable truth.  We don’t even have to know someone or care about them in the least to be eager to hear their innermost secrets.  whether this is about a need to feel important–that we are the privileged elite who know the secrets of an individual…  or an insatiable curiosity, or the longing to understand ourselves by examining our own reflected image in the humanity around us, as we seek to come to grips with why we are who we are but looking at why you are who you are…

and yet that kind of raw, vulnerable honesty is so rare.  because–it’s vulnerable.

Because as we seek to understand ourselves, we analyze before we hear.  If we’re scared of your honesty, we will find a way to distance ourselves from what you’ve said, and judge and dismiss you.   If we like what you’ve said, we’ll seek to identify with it so much that your story may be taken away from you as we try it on for size and stretch it and bend it to fit our own experience.

but sometimes we listen.  and sometimes we can really truly share–and it makes it all worth it!

But why does it seem that it so consistently takes a place of extreme brokenness to draw us to the place of honesty–almost as a last act of desperation?  It seems the healthiest people I know have honesty among close friends, accountability, encouragement, support, healing, love, grace…  honesty it seems is the mortar in the construction of community.  But honesty needs to dance intimately with safety.  

We know that in Christ, we have nothing to hide.  His light exposes all things… the beautiful, the painful, the ugly, and the delightful…  your honesty is a beautiful reflection of the Kingdom that is coming–and is in fact here… growing already.  Your honesty is a piece of the building of that Kingdom on earth!  The Kingdom where “true worshipers who are simply and honestly themselves before Him in worship” will dance, sing, and glory in truth, in light—worship honestly.  (John 4)

Thank you for leading out in honesty and vulnerability.  I want so badly for you to know that you’re not alone.  you are not left behind. 

It is my prayer for you tonight that you find the truth of the safety that your heart can find in the shadow of the wing of our God!  (how’s that for mixing metaphors…  the shadow of a wing that actually casts light… )
But really…
Safe–drawn into the one who already sees and knows all–who delights in you exploring truth… holds your heart and your hands, tenderly equips you to face all truth, and guides you beyond the fragments of truth you grasp into the deep epiphanies of His Truth!

May those epiphanies and revelations astound your spirit and awaken your soul to the glory-life, the resurrection-life… the life lived with Him, delighting in you, and as you walk in integrity and in truth, may you be blessed with people along the way who return that integrity, who offer a safe place, and who do not deceive you!