Things I Don’t Share

Woohoo! Second day of the month and a second post. I must be on a roll or something. Ha! (Edit: This post was mostly written on 11/2/19. Late night conversation in my NATS hotel room with a friend interrupted its publication on that day. I’ll still count it as getting the prompt completed on time though!) Today’s prompt has caused me to think a little more today to tell you what I don’t share. I began thinking about material things and I was quickly aware of the fact that I consider myself very generous. I will share lots of things if I think someone wants it….

….unless you want to share my drink. It’s not that I think it’s filthy or anything. I just don’t share drinks with many people. I have never willingly taken a sip of another person’s beverage or offered them a swig of mine, but when I came down with mono in graduate school, I heard the horror stories of contracting the illness by sharing glasses. I have never been so ill in my life and will do anything necessary to avoid that condition again. If I take a sip from your glass or offer you my drink, you are one of a select group. Honestly, it I feel comfortable enough to ask you to hold my beverage, that takes extreme trust on my part. There are a few people that I would ever consider reaching for their glass and taking a drink…..and most of them are not biological family members.

Perhaps my beverage habit is a bit obsessive. But as I continued thinking throughout the day, I came up with another thing that I don’t readily share. I don’t share the real me very often. That sounds very strange, but it’s true. I tend to let people think that they know me well, but few have really seen me let all of my walls down. The man behind the walls is not extremely different from the person I share with the world….but the few that get into the inner circle are my most trusted companions and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Many of them first got to know me in Southern California. There were a few in Tennessee who knew me fairly well and I’m so blessed to have a couple of extremely close friends with me now in Texas. They know things that I rarely talk about regarding my past, my secrets, my hopes, my worries, and my life. They don’t know these things because they are my friends. They know these things because they dared to asked insightful questions and earned my trust.

Secrets

In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with the television series, Brothers and Sisters. This family drama, currently available on Netflix, centers around the highs and lows of the Walker family. At the series’ beginning, the patriarch suffered a massive heart attack that sent the family reeling. While dealing with their loss, the adult children of Mr. Walker began to learn of the secret life their father led. The rest of the series thus far has explored the devastating effects of these secrets.

It seems that secrets are highly prevalent in our society. Because they are so common, we sometimes fail to acknowledge just how destructive they can be. By their very nature, secrets are truth withheld. They are intended to keep another from grasping the entire picture. I’m not talking about the secret kept from the honoree at a surprise party. When we look carefully at our big secrets, they are often a lie of omission. We allow others to believe an untruth by not providing them accurate information.

Secrets can quickly tie you up in knots. In order to protect the secret, we find ourselves having to hide more and more. In reality, secrets beget secrets! It’s quite possible to get so involved in withholding information that we forget what the secret is . . . and that’s when things start to unravel. As secrets unravel, we begin to experience some degree of shame while our reputation and honesty is called into question by those we were keeping the secret from. We find ourselves in a downward spiral as the truth is revealed in its entirety.

What would happen if we just avoided secrets from the beginning? I think we would find that our lives would be much easier all around. Rather than living in fear that our secret might be exposed, we would have the pleasure of simply existing in a state of openness and honesty. Whatever secret you’re holding onto today, I encourage you to simply let it go, deal with the consequences, and move forward in honesty. After all, “the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32)