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"I Have a Secret"
A friend emailed me earlier this week with a request for prayer. He has been participating in group-counseling for the past two months and next week it will be his turn to tell his story. He wrote me asking, rhetorically,
“Do I tell another polished, memorable, funny, dramatic story, and keep hiding what's really bruised and broken? Or do I tell it like is, even if that's sloppy and tearful and I don't know what the hell any of it means? For a lengthy list of reasons, it's tempting to have another go at the former option.”
There are many words I use to describe myself including father, son, husband, Christian, pastor, teacher, doctor, or reverend. Oddly enough, I never seem to introduce myself as an addict. I never say I am a sinner, a failure at times, anxious, hypocritical, uncertain, insecure or someone who is simply scarred to death that anyone might ever find out any of the things I just listed. Perhaps most ironic of all is that the people and the places around which I am least likely to ever be fully honest, are also the people and places where the most Christians are. I had a seminary professor once confide in me that he felt more comfortable at the pub than in the pulpit because “the people in the pub give me more slack.” Can I get an Amen?
But here is an important truth, I am learning that what has kept me hiding from others all these years, and what probably keeps many of us hiding all these years, is the fear of rejection and our inordinate desire to protect ourselves from pain. We want to be known and we want to be found worthy of the love and affection of others. Lots of people have let us down. I have let many people down. And so, like you, I have learned to stop searching. I call it emotional anorexia. The most obvious downside to our typical games of hide-and-seek, I am learning, is that as long as we persist in the game, we are forfeiting our ability to obtain the very things we so desperately want. Like the anorexic who is desperate for control and ends up being force-fed in a hospital, if you make yourself comfortably numb in an attempt to be free of depression, you can’t help but to do away with joy as well. Turn your heart off to loneliness and you dismiss intimacy to boot. If you won’t risk rejection, you can’t experience acceptance.
In his book Telling Secrets Frederick Buechner reminds us, “I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human.”
In community, Jesus offers us real freedom. Freedom to rip the mask off and lay ourselves bare before a brother or sister, people who have their own secrets, people who also want to be loved and accepted, people who are just as scared that you might find out who they really are when the lights are off. Admittedly, the response to our honesty is not ours to dictate. I am well aware of the risk involved. And yet the truth remains that if you want freedom more than you want protection, if we want freedom more than we want protection, then we will find it. For in the moment we choose to share our secrets, Jesus is invited to stand in the midst of the community and bear his own scars so that we all might be reminded that we are the community of the wounded following a wounded God who offers eternal healing to anyone willing to admit “I am sick.”