| secrets |

Everyone is hiding something....

During the Intern Trek, we helped to participate in a proxy station on the campus of UNLV. This proxy station is all the new rage amongst people trying to do evangelism on college campuses. A proxy station is basically a big display which is meant to ask a probing question of people who witness it. The question that we asked on the trek was: "what are your secrets?" The premise of this question was to get some discussion about the ways in which today's society operates behind secrets. Everyone has them , and we keep them held so tight that we begin to let them dictate our existence.

There is so much drama in our world today. So much pain, so much hurt, so much mistrust. Most of this can be attributed to the fact that we are keeping secrets (many of them horrible and shameful). We keep secrets about all kinds of things, little things: (like my fear of butterflies), because we're afraid that being exposed in this very individualistic society can be certainly embarassing beyond all repair. We keep secrets about big things: (like my suicide attempt in high school), because we don't want to re-live certain problems or issues that are happening around or to us.

Whatever it really is, these secrets are supposed to stay deep down inside of us, because if they were to ever be revealed, we would be made unnecessarily exposed in front of family, friends, or strangers. This would include us keeping things from others to save face. Christians are especially fond of that one. We like to give off the idea that we are all doing quite well. A good Christian doesn't have problems, because we have God on our side! He provides for us and we don't have any reason to be hurting or struggling. There's also the popular idea that we have no reason to be complaining, because we're so much better off than millions of other people in this world. There might be some pressure for us to present ourselves as doing well, because we want to have something tangible for non-Christians to see. We have better lives, because we know God, and because of that, you should want to know Him too. This of course keeps us from letting people see the power of God. Part of the problem with us keeping secrets is that we don't let people see us suffer. If someone knows that we're having a hard time with something, we just assume that it's easiest to pray about things and leave that as it is. When non-Christians find out that we have problems, it makes us seem like we are hypocrites.

Secrets even affect our romantic relationships. As a result of our secrets, we're constantly in a back and forth game with the opposite sex. No one wants to seem more attached to someone than they are, so they have to put on some fake bravado. Instead of admitting that I have been hurt by women before, I'll just put on a "hard to get" facade, so that I don't have to deal with being real with girls. Instead of admitting that some guy has broken your heart, you'll play the "I'm going to string men along" role, because you'd rather re-gain the power that you feel men can have over you. These secrets, although maybe not always conventional secrets, can really affect our lives in deeper ways than we can imagine.

Secrets definitely murk up our relationship with God. We want to be able to hide things from Him, even though He knows what we're going through, even better than we do. Sometimes, instead of keeping a secret, we'll lock a door to a part of our life that we aren't ready for Him to be involved in. We'll give everything else up to Him, but we won't be willing to let Him behind door number 2. "You can have every other part of me God, but I have to have this thing to myself. It's all for me! No one else can have access to that." Unfortunately, when we do this, we're allowing ourselves to be opened to deception from satan. Anything that is not of God, that we attempt to hide from Him, is giving satan the opportunity to work in. When we aren't in true community, we are vulnerable to attack from satan. We are essentially, out of the position that God has set up for us. We gather strength from being with brothers and sisters in Christ. Being separated from them makes you vulnerable in a different way.

Secrets, they're tearing our world apart, one withheld story by the next. Jesus came to us so that we could regain our openness with God and with each other. We don't have to have secrets from each other. That doesn't mean that we go about spilling absolutely everything about ourselves with anyone, but we are to live in real community. Community calls us to be real with ourselves and real with others. Christianity is about having community, so if you're harboring secrets, you're really allowing yourself to be separated from community, thus instantly making your religious walk much harder than it has to be. It is not wrong to be real with each other! We need to do that, because we need each other to be looking out for each other. There is no shame in being vulnerable with family.

That's a lesson that I'm working through right now. Just thought I'd share.

I'm out...