There’s nothing quite as drawing as an honest Christian human-being. Why does this seem to be the case? In part, because it seems like many who think of themselves as Christians, don’t seem very honest about very much. And, even before I start down the road of appearing (even to myself) to not being one of ‘these’ people, I have to be honest and admit that this only makes sense to the degree that I myself acknowledge that am often not very honest. At the very least my honesty is quite selective. So I can accuse no one without accusing myself.
That being said, though, I think Christians often fit quite nicely with many people who simply do not want to face the realities of this world, both the world inside them and the world outside them. I think an honest Christian human-being is often quite near the end of their rope in terms of what they live with day in and day out, recognizing in human terms how precarious things are…how unlike the false reality marketed by our culture things really are. Our cultural falseness, our un-reality, leads straight away from where the desperateness of real reality leads us. We are alive and we are in constant danger one way or another, and we must admit this against a culture that refuses to do so.
The irony is that in all of its falseness, our world is so addicted to so many things, to so many kinds of escape; how could we even imagine it to be telling us the truth about how good things are. Honesty, in part, is about acknowledging this, naming it, speaking it out loud, if not for the ears of my own heart, then for the ears of others.
…and it is in the so doing, that we realize the more accurate position of our humanity and, perhaps even more importantly, our need…our natural, real and true state of dependence. Our desire for true love, is recognized substantially on the cusp of our desperation. This is a Love that we cannot provide for ourselves, that can only be provided for us. And only by someone who can really love like this – God himself.
A lack of honesty, though, skips over all of this…and misses nearly everything we truly need.
There was nothing left of me. I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilizing force in my life that I felt there was no hope…My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years, seemed finally complete. It wasn't. I thought I'd left Him, but He hadn't left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity, and sobriety. Then my mind started focusing on God.
-- Johnny Cash
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves.
-- C.S. Lewis
Honesty leads to something as magnificently wonderful, as profoundly powerful…as forgiveness. The ability forgive oneself is centered again only in something that can’t be provided by ourselves, it is something that we can experience from and with God. But we have to be honest enough to see our need for it. Forgiveness when experienced, is something like the ocean tide, it washes over us, drowning us in mercies and ebbs back to its next destination. We, though, are now part of the ocean that descends on the next person and actually become part of the delivery of it to others. This is part of the power of such a thing like forgiveness.
Honesty then, as a virtue, is a portal to the soul – our own and others – through which the flood waters of forgiveness can flow…to and from us.
To be Christian is to be fundamentally human and to be truly human, you and I must be honest and open to the saving graces of a Loving God. When that happens, we are drawn to people and people are drawn to us.
Be honest.
