Honesty

This might be an awkward blog post, because I want to talk about the honesty involved in composing a blog post. I often read blogs of ones who really truly want to dig down to the most honest pits of their souls and put all that stuff into the most honest words possible in a blog post. I love those posts. I want to write those posts, but that is hard.

Recently, I read a post on Tim's blog and made a comment about how much I appreciate his honesty. Here's part of what he said in response to my comment: "I struggle with being honest on the blog: I want to be honest, because I believe that's the best way to live, but I am ever afraid that people will think poorly of me if I am truly honest. Fact is, I am not completely honest on the blog. Sometimes people say that, you know, there's a line of what is appropriate to be honest about, but I don't know why or where."

Sadie and I went to see The Invention of Lying at the beginning of last school year, and in case you don't know the premise, it's a movie about a society that only speaks truths. Then, Ricky Gervais "invents" lying when he goes to the bank and tells the teller he has more money in his bank account than he actually has so that he can pay his rent. The weird thing about this film, though, is that truth never appears offensive. The reason we lie is because we don't want to offend. We lie to avoid negative consequences, but those negative consequences don't appear to exist in this world--at least not in terms of hurt feelings. Somehow pride and ego must be diluted when the concept of lying is removed from the picture.

Which may or may not be far from the truth, but that seems an impossible experiment to conduct in our lying reality. As far as blogging goes, though, I don't know that I'd say not being completely honest is a blatant lie, but it can be misleading. Sometimes I get in the mood to blog, and I'll write a post that really does not quite encompass the reality of a situation or of my own thoughts. With that, I do echo Tim's feelings on honesty in that such vulnerability is a scary thing when it can lead to others thinking less of me. Often times the image I put off to others becomes a much bigger concern to me than the image I put off to God. God knows those depths of my soul that even I don't know. I can't lie or hide anything from Him, and the fact that God still loves me more than anyone else can, despite that, is extremely humbling when I bother to appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I can morph other people's opinions of me by controlling the image I put off. I can write about how great it is that I'm babysitting Kasper, but then in reality, I've been fed up with him for the past week. I got home really late last night from a concert, and in my sleep-deprived state this morning, I was straight up grumpy and lost my filter. Kasper's parents only let him watch two hours of TV when they're working, but he likes to remind me that he watches endless amounts of TV when his parents get home. Sometimes when he's done with his two hours and decides to bug me, I become very annoyed by this rule. Today he told me he had half an hour left and I told him I really did not care how much TV he watched. He reminded me of the rule, and then, yes, I exposed his parents' rule being void when they got home and how it really makes little difference that he's not watching as much TV with me when he's vegged out in front of a TV all evening. I know, it was a terrible terrible thing to say, and I have apologized to his mother for it already after he called her and told her what I said. He's bound to be as sick of me as I am of him, and it's rather unfortunate that we're leaving off on this note. But, that is the reality of the situation. As much as I'd like to look like a good person, I am not, and God is even gracious enough to humble me today as my pride has definitely been flaring up to a maximal level over the past few days.

We all are sinful, and that word "sinful" encompasses a lot of muck we sure do want to throw blinders over. I think sometimes these blinders are even used to delude ourselves, and that's when Satan can drag us further into the muck of that specific sin. Honesty is hard enough to embrace within myself, and it's that much harder to throw down in a blog post. I guess that's why we keep pointing at God and the fact that He is Honesty, and in maintaining that perspective, he will point right back at us and say, "Well done, my good and faithful servant."