Messy.

“Find a friend and stay close and with a melting heart, tell them whatever you’re most ashamed of.”

Recently some of my good friends have been making confessions. They leak out a little at a time, partially dammed-up by the fear that they’ll lose something, telling me. The part of your self-image that’s derived from watching your reflection in other people’s eyes, maybe. Love. Privacy.

In Celebration of the Disciplines, one of my favorite chapters was on confession. I don’t know if all of these were Richard Foster’s main points, but some of the things I got out of it were that confession, while absolutely necessary to the soul, is a very intimate act, its own kind of communion, really. That the confessor needs to respect the sacredness of what’s said. That offering your story up is worship, a sacrifice. That each act of opening up, or making a request for help, is holy, and not something to be shared against the confessee’s wishes, and not something to sneer at, or back away from, or be disappointed by. Because it’s an act of prayer.

I’m not going to make any confessions here. For one thing I have a lot of trust issues, and a lot of fear. I think some of it may even be rational. I’m terrified of doing anything that would threaten my acceptance in a community, and that includes letting people know me really well.

And I know none of this is ground-breaking stuff, but I have the same trouble owning up to God. When I’m ashamed of something I’ve done, I tend to literally duck my head. I pretend God’s not with me, filling up the universe, and completely focused not only on holding it together, but also on me. I don’t want him to see me, because I’ve forgotten he loves me.

I was afraid, and so I hid.

I think hiding is probably more indicative of our distance from God than some of the other things we think of as sin, or falling short, or absolutely sucking at being human and made in his image, or however you want to define it. I think something that makes God really sad, regularly, is when we start ignoring him, or his people, because we can’t bear to look at his face.

I want to know what I’d find there if I did look up. Because I’m not going to get any better, looking away.

I was talking to a girlfriend of mine the other day, and I told her how when I was little, I always cried when I accidently broke a dish. I felt so bad about it every time, and I was telling her how each time my parents would try to comfort me and tell me it was okay.

“Didn’t they make you afraid?” she asked. I asked her what she meant.

“Some parents, when their kids break something, they get angry, they try to make them afraid to do it again.”

“No,” I said. Thinking, why would my parents have yelled at me? How would that have helped?

I’m not saying sin as the same thing as broken dishes, but I think God sees every causal connection. He knows everything that we know, and so much more, about why we’ve made the choices we’ve made. --What’s besetting us within. --What’s making war on us from the outside. Every fear and hurt we’re still suffering from (even the ones we’ve forgotten about). Every lie we’re still believing. And our God is saturated and fundamentally made out of love the same way a star is made out of hydrogen, helium, photons, plasma . . .(whatever stars are composed of). When I look away he doesn’t, and his expression doesn’t change. I can tell you these things, and want you to know they’re true, and at the same time, not believe them for myself.

When my friends are suffering and struggling, it breaks my heart. I hurt for them, and cry for them, and want to help, and want to make it different. But when they’re afraid to make their struggles known, that’s even more painful. I want to be worthy of their trust. I want to trust them back, and love them well enough to share my secrets, to be cleansed and healed by the act of confession. I think it’ll help me see God in a more accurate light, help me feel more certain that God knew what he was getting himself into, when he made us, that he knew all the messes of men (and women) we’d become. That he decided he’d prefer it this way, even though it wouldn’t be easy. That he likes us.