Telling on Yourself (Part II)
In my last post, I talked about confession – the idea of telling on yourself. Almost everyone agrees that coming out with your screwups is huge and healthy. The Catholic Church encourages anonymous confessions of our sins to God through a priest. Some Protestant churches have weekly confession where you confess out loud in front of the whole church. Talk about guts!
What I’ve been talking about here is person-to-person stuff. Confiding privately in someone you know. Someone who cares about you and who’ll keep loving you no matter what you’ve done or thinking about doing.
But there’s more good about telling on yourself than just purging your crap. Here are three other benefits to opening yourself up and being vulnerable . . .
- Aspirations – Suppose you have an inkling to help the poorest of the poor in Haiti. Keep that inkling to yourself, and it’ll likely starve to death. Share it with people you love, who love God, and who love you, and before you know it, someone has connected you to a ministry doing something in Haiti. When you share your aspirations . . . when you make yourself vulnerable by telling others your inklings or dreams, you get resources you didn’t have before. If you aspire to have another child, start a company, start a small group or even a church, tell somebody! Good things germinate in the light better than in the dark. When your aspirations get fed by the input and energy of those who care about you, they get legs and start moving.
- Accountability – Bob Goff teaches, “Don’t hold me accountable, hold me close.” Behind that cool one-liner is the presumption that someone is there to do the holding. Do you have a trusted friend to open up to? Or by opening up, do you gain a trusted friend? Once you’ve revealed your stuff to someone, they’re closer to you. You want to do well in their eyes and vice versa. You don’t want to let them down. That’s natural accountability flowing from a love relationship between two friends who care about each other. The trick is deciding you love yourself enough to take the risk. To call a friend and say, “Hey, I need to talk to you. This isn’t about you . . . it’s about me. Can we get together?” It takes courage. It takes faith you’re worthy of having a friend listen to you share about yourself, not to fix you but to feel you.
- Acceptance – Something amazing happens when we open ourselves up to someone. They love us more, not less. We think they’ll look down on us or run away, but instead, they pull closer. We feel accepted when we thought we’d feel judged. I watched a young friend shed his mask as he opened up about his long bout with alcohol and drugs. He took off his mask and was shocked when I took off mine and told him of thirteen years of drinking almost every day. He and I accept each other. We’re connected. We’re closer than we could have ever been wearing our masks. Friends for life because he took the risk and told on himself.
Question: Will you reach out to your best friend this week and share a secret you’ve been holding back? One aspiration? One daunting issue? One inkling?
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