These Are My Confessions
Out of all the aspects of life that I struggle with, “faking the funk” is my most difficult. Being inauthentic (and just flat out lying) is like swallowing glass to me. Sometimes, my faces give me away (or so my friends and coworkers like tell me), and sometimes, it’s just how my heart aches. It’s like my truth is bursting through my seams, and it often feels like I’m ripping my own self to shreds when I hold it instead of confessing it. You see, when you sidestep the truth, that’s when things get heavy. You’ve got to tell another lie to cover up the first one, or you get angry when certain topics come up in public when deep down, it’s your own guilt rocking your world. You wind up in friendships and relationships with folks you don’t even really know because you became who you thought you needed to become to the person who is actually a representative of themselves. Or maybe you inadvertently isolate yourself because although you want people, you only let them get to know the ideal version of you (and let me tell you–it’s just too hard for folks to be in relationship with a representative). Through the journey of this year, dear reader, and in my final monthly mindful message, I have found that my salvation (and my blessing) is in confessing and forgiving.
In devotion recently, I was talking to God about sin. I got honest. “God, you know I pray for forgiveness, but I want my sin to be revealed to me. I want to know what it is that I’ve made okay in my life that’s actually still wreaking havoc on my soul. THAT’s what I want to be forgiven and healed from,” and boy, is God a deliverer? Within 24 hours, so many memories of good intentions gone bad had risen into my thoughts and through my body that the only thing I could think to do was to get on my knees and call on Jesus. But, this very act of faith, my display of humility is just what He’s called us to do. In Psalm 32, David so explicitly gives us believers instructions on how to continue on our path towards righteousness, forgiveness, and ultimately the eternal joy.
“How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered!... When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me…I acknowledged my sin to You; and my iniquity I did not hide; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’; and you forgave the guilt of my sin (vv. 1 – 5).”
If we all know one thing, we know what guilt feels like; we know the aches and pains of holding the weight of inadequacy and regret and remorse and suffering and anxiety all wrapped up into one. And if you are a true believer, you, too, know the weight and horror of sin. What David leaps to share with us is that if you humbly come to God in prayer and confess with your mouth the sins of your heart, God will wipe the guilt away and wash you in the rays of His forgiveness. This is not easy though, and even David says so.
“Do not be as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, whose trappings include bit and bridle to hold them in check, otherwise they will not come near to you. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but he who trusts in the Lord, lovingkindness shall surround him (v. 8 – 9).”
In this world we live in, it definitely sometimes FEELS like a farmyard, surrounded by horses and mules that don’t believe, that won’t pray, that use their ignorance to explain away His grace and power, and that might as well be using the wind and rain as guiding compasses. Even as Christians, we get stubborn and sometimes don’t notice that the allure of temptation is actually our disbelief of who God really is. The truth is, friends (and I pray to confess this one for the rest of my life), that God is a healer, that He is a deliverer, that He is a provider, and that every promise that He has made in my life will come to pass bigger and greater than anything I could have every hoped for. Because of this, when I sin and when I don’t confess my sin, not only am I doubting Him, I’m doubting that there is a heaven of righteousness and sinners made whole. I can’t see the gift of His forgiveness if I don’t recognize the death in my sin.
So, for you, carrying weight – carrying abortions that you’ve never mentioned, carrying rape by family members that you’ve never told, carrying moving drugs for the possibility at a better life, carrying the burden of not asking for consent and still sleeping with her, carrying the little white lie on a co-worker that ended up in your promotion, carrying the slight gaslighting of a loved one because you just wanted them to feel what you felt for a moment, carrying traumas that you don’t even realize have shaped your world (but you’re starting to get the idea), lay them at His feet in prayer and prepare yourself for the ethereal and physical promise of forgiveness. I promise you, beautiful child, that His yoke is easier and His burden is lighter than what you’ve been holding. At the core of my work as a therapist, I help people find the words to confess their truth, forgive others, and most of all, forgive themselves. If you’ve taken nothing else for our time together, do this in remembrance of our Savior: confess and forgive…over and over and over again.