The Incompleteness of “Total Honesty”

The Incompleteness of “Total Honesty”

Keith, why would anyone who is a Christian hesitate to be totally honest?  Isn’t it just a question of having the courage to risk rejection?  Can you think of reasons or situations where total honesty would not be the best policy?

One reason that total honesty is not as simple as it seems is the virtually universal experience of “denial”—that is, we cannot even see many of our own true motivations. Many Pharisees were considered to be leaders in having integrity, and yet Jesus told them you can pick out the tiniest speck of evil in your brother’s eye but you cannot see the log in your own.  So one reason to hesitate in saying your truth about another person is we can’t see our real motives in blasting someone with our truth.

The second reason is more complex and difficult to understand.  Here’s how I discovered that:  It was still very dark, but I was awake, having been disturbed by a bad dream.  I was weeping because the dream had recalled an experience in my adolescence which was so painful that I thought I would never be free from its haunting presence.  Several times over the years I had been bothered by this dream.  And it always made me cringe; wanting to undo something I had done as a teenager.

This experience and its painful reliving over the years had changed my whole life, especially my views concerning integrity, love, and honesty in close relationships.  And although I hated the memory and had prayed many times that God would erase it from my mind, there was no doubt that it had helped me as a husband, father and friend.

It had happened at a boys’ summer camp where I was a counselor after my freshman year in college.  I was in charge of a cabin full of junior boys, about eight and nine years old.  They were at the hero-worship age, and I really loved them.  One boy, Mortey, a camper from somewhere in eastern Oklahoma, was a particular favorite of mine.  We became very close friends.  He was in my canoe on the float trip and played the starring comedy role in the play I wrote and organized as tribe coordinator.  He was a cagey little performer and stole the show with his quick grasp of humor.  Although they teased Mortey about his weight and the fact that he wore glasses, he was outgoing and had lots of old-fashioned guts and intelligence.

The little guy used to reach up and take my hand when we were walking alone, as if I were his dad.  And I would look down on him and smile.  He tended to be a little cocky about everything, including his relationship with me—though he never acted that way when he thought I was around.

At the end of eight weeks the time came for the camp awards.  The counselors met to vote on the honor camper trophies—the most important symbols of acceptance and success a boy could win.  When the preliminary weeding out had been done, two boys remained in the race for junior honor camper: Mortey and Bobby.  Wanting to have integrity, I decided I was so biased I could not vote, but when the ballots had been counted, both boys had the same number.  I had to vote to break the tie.

At that time in my life I was an obsessive compulsive on the inside, a joking character on the outside.  But I had been taught that absolute integrity was the highest value.  When decisions which seemed to concern my integrity were to be made, I really strained to do the right thing.

As I looked at these two boys and their camp records, I tried to be objective.  Bobby was a much better athlete and had broken some records, but Mortey definitely had the edge in the human understanding department.  They had both helped their tribes by winning contests and by being friendly kids.  It was easy to see why the vote had been tied.  I was miserable.  Little Mortey had done a great job… but he was a little cocky, and he did have a few faults I knew about.  This definitely gave Bobby a slight edge.  Everyone knew how close we had been; I was afraid that if I voted for Mortey the other counselors would think I was voting for him because of our friendship.  It was strange that such a trivial thing could have been so momentous, but my whole integrity seemed to be on the line, and I felt sort of sick at my stomach.  I did not want the responsibility of deciding.

My hesitation over the simple decision was delaying the meeting, and the other counselors became irritated.  Under the pressure I decided—against Mortey.   And we went on.

Only inside I didn’t go on.  I knew that although I had been honest, I had somehow been wrong.  While sitting there, I got the idea that I ought to level with Mortey about what had happened.  I tried to dismiss the thought, but it kept coming back.  And I felt I had to tell him the truth “in order to have integrity” in the situation.  This was my problem.

On the last morning at camp, as all the boys were getting on the bus, Mortey came up to me.  Everyone was yelling for him to hurry.  His face was streaked with tears, and it was obvious that he had been crying and did not want me to know.  As we walked away from the others, I told him how much our friendship meant to me. I went on to tell him how close he had come to being elected honor camper—that in fact the vote had been a tie.  His eyes got very wide, and I continued in my nineteen-year-old total honesty, “I hadn’t voted up till that time, Mortey, because everyone knows that you and I are such close friends.  But they made me vote then…and I voted for Bobby.”  As I started to explain why I had done it, the look on his face caught me completely off guard.  I will never forget it.  It haunts me still, because I saw the look of a soul betrayed by his dearest friend.  In an instant I saw how wrong I had been and why.  This little boy really loved me.  And I realized that he had done a much finer job than Bobby at camp.  But because Mortey had loved me, he had revealed his faults as well as his good points to me, and I had used this knowledge to judge and condemn him (from his perspective).

He just stood there and stared at me in disbelief.  After his dad had let him down by leaving his mother, he had trusted me.  I had the chance to give him all he had ever wanted, but I had tossed it to another boy in a different tribe, a boy I hardly knew.  He covered his face with his hands and ran towards the bus. I tried to grab him, to explain my feelings, but he broke loose and, wriggling between the last few campers, disappeared onto the bus.  The door closed and the bus pulled out.  I ran along beside it, hunting for Mortey in the windows.  But all the other kids were pressed against them, and I didn’t see him at all.  In the midst of the shouting and singing of the camp loyalty song, Mortey rode out of my life in a cloud of dust.

It was years later, after I became a Christian and began to understand myself and my problems more clearly, that I began to see the trap “honesty” can be.  It had become my highest value—“honesty at any cost.”  This meant that I worshiped honesty.  In my struggle to decide who should be honor camper, I had been so intent on maintaining my own integrity that the broader values in the judging situation had escaped me.  And in any case, I was blind to the consequences of trying to clear my own skirts with Mortey by telling him all—not realizing that a nine-year-old boy could not understand me.  But now I realize that maybe he did understand me: A Christian Pharisee who cared more about “being pure” than loving him.  Maybe that was what broke his heart.

For this little boy saw the world through a different set of eyes that I did.  It was to be almost ten years before I began to surrender and put myself into the hands of the One who sees life in the same way that Mortey did.  For in his world there was a higher value than raw honesty with which to judge people… and that value is love.

If he actually did it (was honest) for the sake of having good conscience, he would become a Pharisee and cease to be a truly moral person.  I think that even saints did not care for anything other than simply to serve God, and I doubt that they ever had it in mind to become saints.  If that were the case, they would have  become only perfectionists rather than saints.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Lord, help me to realize the limited nature of my ability to judge the total circumstances in any human encounter.  Forgive me for being blinded by needs for integrity and putting my adolescent desire for rightness ahead of Mortey’s need for love.  But, God, thank You for teaching me through that little boy the importance of the kind of loving loyalty You have for us, which—for me—transcends all Your other gifts, including faith, and that your love even transcends Your judgment of our sins.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:1, 2

The Incompleteness of “Total Honesty”

Squelching a Word of Love—to Keep from Being Hurt

Keith, not long ago a good friend, someone I like and respect, complimented me on some design work I’d done.  I knew he meant it and at one level I was very pleased—especially since we work in the same field and he’s very good at what he does.  But I was also, sort of… embarrassed, and felt like he could spot the defects and might just be buttering me up.  So I laughed and shook my head and said, “I was lucky they even accepted it!  I tossed it off in about thirty minutes from an idea I had in junior college.”  Actually, that wasn’t true.  I worked for days on that design.  My friend looked at me as if I’d hurt his feelings, nodded his head and walked off.  Why would I do that?  Have you had a similar experience?

Grapeleaves

Good question.  This is how I recorded my experience years ago in Habitation of Dragons: Squelching a Word of Love, page 118.

***

“That was a great job, Keith!”  The man who was speaking is a person whom I deeply respect and love.  I had just given a talk in our church, and he was enthusiastically and sincerely affirming me.

“Thanks, but I’m afraid I was too direct,” I replied.  “I was tired and felt a little hostile.”  He looked at me strangely, and I went into the educational wing to get ready for Sunday school.

While walking away, I realized what I had done.  I had very subtly and unintentionally devalued him as a person.  He was trying to tell me that I had done a good job, and he had really meant it.  But instead of thanking him for his affirmation, I had told him in effect, “Actually, you aren’t really very smart.  I heard some negative things about my talk that you didn’t hear.”  Although I had not said that, I saw that my negative reply had in some way rejected him and his kindness in complimenting me in the first place.

Thinking about what had happened; I realized how often I turn people off when they try to say something nice to me.  If I happened to make a high score on an exam in college, for instance, and someone said, “congratulations,” I might have laughed and come back with something cute like, “As much time as I spent studying for that one, an orangutan would have done well.”  I seemed to turn attention away from their attempts to affirm me, thinking somehow that I was being humble.

But now I am beginning to see that instead of humility, this inability to accept praise or affirmation is really an insidious form of pride and insecurity.  Further, it represents a completely thoughtless attitude toward the needs of the one trying to offer congratulations.  If a person is sincere with a compliment, he or she is going out on a limb to identify with me.  The person is reaching out to say, “I, too, feel as you do or appreciate life as you do.”  Or, “In some sense we are related or I would not have responded to what you said.”  But my reply of supposed humility has turned the attention away from the person giving the compliment and toward me and my cleverness.  I have devalued the offered love by joking or saying in effect, “No, we are not alike, because you misinterpreted my performance.” Or, “Your perception is faulty.”  Or, “If you are like me, you are really a dummy, because any dolt could have done what I have.”

My dear friend Bruce Larson finally confronted me one day about squelching a compliment by saying, “Keith, you are a good giver of affirmation, but you’re a stingy receiver!”  It was clear to me in that moment that with all my apparent willingness, as a Christian, to love other people, I fail to love them when I refuse to hear their attempts to love me.  I suppose I reject their love because I’m afraid it is unreal, and I cannot risk being hurt—in case they do not mean it—or sometimes I evidently want to appear humble, if they do mean it.  So I protect myself from being hurt or from looking proud by dismissing as insignificant any attempts people make to say affirming things to me.  Never before had I realized fully the negative, squelching effect of refusing to accept another’s kind word.

Since making these discoveries, I am going to try to look people in the eye and say simply and warmly, “Thank you,” if they try to say something positive to me.  At a deep level I know that anything worthwhile I have is from God.  And somehow, by letting people express positive feelings to me through a handshake and a few words, I think something is completed in the attempt to communicate the love of God in human terms.

“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.  By words one of us can give to another the greatest happiness or bring about utter despair. . . . Words call forth emotions and are universally the means by which we influence our fellow creatures.  Therefore let us not despise the use of words. . . .”

Sigmund Freud

A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis[1]

Thank you, God, that You are willing to receive my stumbling and often half-sincere attempts to praise You.  Since You showed us in Christ that it is important for us to be able to receive, please give me the grace I need to do so.  I am grateful that You take these praises of mine seriously rather than rejecting me with a denial or a joke, which would leave me alone and sorry I tried.  Help me to learn how to love.  But, O Lord, give me the serenity to risk receiving from other people . . . love, which I fear may not be real.

It is hard to receive:

Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.”  Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.”  Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”

John 13:8, 9


[1] Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York: Washington Square Press), 22.

The Incompleteness of “Total Honesty”

Finding the Life We’ve Been Looking For

Keith, I keep running into people who can’t seem to believe there really is a God—and honestly I don’t know if I do. These scientists are almost making fun of people who believe that God is real!  And if God is real, they ask, how can he change the basic character of people who believe in him?  Could you help me with this?

Grapeleaves

This is an excellent time to be asking those questions.  With regard to the reality of God—think about all the brilliant men and women who have claimed that they have had a relationship with God (e.g. C. S. Lewis, St. Francis, Luther, Augustine, Martin Luther King, Jr. and scientists like Blaise Pascal, not to mention all the men and women who were not writers but the witness of whose lives changed the generations in which they lived.  They wouldn’t all have to be right for there to be a God who interacts with people—if only one person in all of history was right about having a personal relationship with God, then God is real, and interactive.

There are all kinds of philosophical arguments for and against the hypothesis that God is real, but Christianity is about a God who has a “personality,” that is, a God who can be “known.”  And the New Testament makes the claim that if a person wants to know if God is real, the only way that person can know is to take the hypothesis that God is real and commit his or her life to God and to the discovering and doing of God’s will in that person’s whole life.

I understand that you are saying to take God that seriously is to take a big risk.  And of course that is true.  But even scientists have to take risks and face rejection sometimes when they take an idea and assume that it is true (when they take a hypothesis) and then scientists (and people on spiritual journeys) make experiments in the real world to see if the idea holds up in relation to things and situations the scientist already believes are true.

So how would you prove for yourself that God is real?

When I came to that place in my life, I was frightened.  I was afraid that if God were real and I surrendered my real life to God and to trying to live according to the principles attributed to God, then God might change me into some sort of pious religious nut that my family and friends wouldn’t want to be with.

But when I finally decided I had to know if God were real, and surrendered my life, my future, to God, that was when I began to realize that the life that God offers people who are in relation to him was the life I’d always been trying to find, to discover by becoming successful and prominent somehow.

A long time ago, a wise Christian told me that God doesn’t change us into something that we are not already.  Rather the truth is that we have almost from birth been adding unreal things to our lives, personal characteristics.  For instance, I tried to appear to be a strong, self-confident Western male—stronger and smarter than I really was.  It was as if I was wearing life like a suit two sizes too large, hoping I’d grow into it.

When I decided to surrender my whole life to God as I saw God revealed in the Biblical story, and began to do the disciplines of prayer and helping other people in ways I felt God would want me to do those things, it was more like taking old ill-fitting clothes off and discarding them.  Because I didn’t need the exaggerated characteristics in order to feel that I was enough.

As I met some strong beautiful Christians with integrity and humility, I realized that what God offers to do for me is not to transform me into something I never have been but rather to help me remove things I and the culture I live in have added to my natural self that I had used to cover up, to hide the person God made me to be.  And the unconscious fear of being revealed as the imperfect person I really am, tainted all my relationships—particularly my close relationships.

So the big news for me is that when I am being the loving child that God designed me to be, I am free not to hide or pretend to be more than I am.  And that means that I could learn to be myself and risk being rejected when I set out to become the authentic human being who was in one sense always inside me, waiting to get free enough to live and be happy being who and what I am.

That’s why I began to learn how to write as a vocation and finally left the oil exploration business—not because the oil exploration business is evil somehow, but because I was a writer hiding inside the life of an oil business entrepreneur.  This has not been an easy or trouble free journey, and may not be one that you should take.  But I thank God every day that I decided to trust God in this way.

It’s a long trip to the Beginning—clear back to Square One.

Lord, thank you that we already have everything we need to be the people you designed us to be.  Help us to learn how to remove the extra characteristics we have “put on” trying to be happy and successful, and to gradually discover and, where appropriate, reveal ourselves the way you meant for us to be.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

“For an answer Jesus called over a child, whom he stood in the middle of the room, and said, “I’m telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you’re not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom. What’s more, when you receive the childlike on my account, it’s the same as receiving me.”

Matthew 18:2-5, The Message

Note: For a clear account of what actually happened when Keith made this beginning in his everyday life as a husband, father, and young business executive see the newly republished The Taste of New Wine.

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