Honesty does not always bring a response of love, but it is absolutely essential to it. – Ray Blanton

People confuse “honesty” with a type of “happiness”.   They say something like, “He can be honest because he is happy.”  But it’s not true.  Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes.  That’s is honesty.  Failure is not necessarily bad, it’s reality.

So the question we need to ask ourselves is not, “What will we do IF we fail?”, BUT “How WILL I respond when I fail?”

Now, some of you are wondering why I am being so negative with all this talk of failure.  To that I say, this is not being negative… it is being honest.

We are often guilty of lying to ourselves.  This is like cheating at solitaire.  How can we improve if we insist on lying or cheating?  If we make a mistake (or just plain screw up), we must stop trying to cover it up.  We have to stop assigning blame to others for our mistakes.  The choice is ours, we can either:

• admit its our fault, commit to not make the same mistake again and in doing so become better than we were yesterday,
• deny responsibility, and become worse than yesterday.

OK, now for the things that will happen when you are honest.

1. Some people will stop speaking to you. – Family members, colleagues, and some friends will begin to avoid you.  I have experienced this personally, under the guise that I should be more tactful, because everyone is not in the same place as I am.  The truth may hurt you, but if told with the right spirit it will not harm you.  Let me illustrate the difference.  Kids love candy & sweets, they taste great and make life good. However they are ultimately bad for you and cause cavities.  On the flip side, filling cavities at the dentists hurts us but ultimately makes us feel better. The lesson here is that some things can hurt us, without harming us (filling cavities) AND things that feel good can really be harming us (eating sweets).
2. People may think you are crazy. – One of the definitions for crazy is an unpredictable, nonconforming person.  Why is it that we are thought of as crazy when we are merely practicing the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus, “Treat others as you want others to treat you”, He then says this sums up the entire Old Testament.  WoW!
3. Many folks will find you entertaining – If 100 people are lying, and 1 is telling the truth than the one is going to stand taller than anyone else.  People will come back to you, at first probably because you’re like a “live” reality show, but then because they admire you.
4. People will trust your advice. – People will come back for advice.  Not because they agree with you, but because they know the advice is TRUE, coming from the heart and not because there is anything for sale.  Honesty is sometimes about the scars and the blemishes.  It’s more than just bragging about failure, but about truly helping people.  We all have worked very hard to hide our failures in corners where it is dark and faded.  But when someone brings their life close to the light,  (For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light – Ephesians 5:8), we can encourage, by being honest with ourselves and others.
5. You become FREE. – (You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free – John 8:32)  The walls we build in our lives are for our security.  They protect us from others seeing who and what we really are… “if we tell the girl we like her, she might not like me back”, or “if I say X, everyone else might say Y.”  Jesus said it better than I ever could in Matthew 5, “let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

Every day, just push out those boundaries a little further.  Reach for that freedom. We may never truly get there.  Strive to see how far you can go, just like a little child with their parent.  Eventually, the boundaries are so far away we begin to feel the pleasures of true freedom.

Dave