Therein the truth lies

I was just thinking today…. Why couldn’t we all just be done with pretending? You know all the things we do in our personal interactions with each other? We sugarcoat things, we try to make ourselves look better, we try to act like we don’t have these little problems in life. But aren’t we ALL like that? There are probably many reasons we do this. We think we need to live up to a certain image (especially if we call ourself a Christian). Or we want to be accepted or acceptable.

I know this is pretty much impossible. But what if we all decided we’d agree to drop the facade. “Hey how’s it going?” “Pretty crappy!” “Ok, great!” If we all agreed to be honest then no one would be surprised by that kind of response. What made me think this was that I was driving to work today after eating lunch at home (very thankful for living close to work!) and I was listening to my new Arcade Fire CD on my headphones in the car. Now, though I was being VERY careful in my driving and making sure it wasn’t too loud, I DO know it’s illegal to drive with headphones on. In fact, I was pulled over a few years ago before I knew it was illegal.

I thought “Hey, isn’t it probably not good for me, a pastor, to be doing something illegal?” Then I thought about all these little things we conceal in order to be more acceptable or not to seem so bad. Like, who of you eats a whole bag of chips in a single setting? Who of you watches TV shows that you are embarrassed to admit because of the content? Maybe we don’t tell on ourselves because we want to continue in the pleasurable behavior.

Well, anyway… I was just thinking. What harm would it do to just be honest. I have found that there’s not much more freeing in life than being honest.