The Best Reason To Be Real About Your Struggles
We sat around the coffee shop table in silence. I had just spilled the tea on a rather intense personal issue in my family in a spur of the moment sort of confession. Of the handful of other women with me, at least of half of them joined in, saying they shared my struggle within their immediate families. They thanked me for my courage in speaking up and asking for prayer. They said I demonstrated how they might address their own versions of the issue with bravery, grace, and humility. We shared resources we’d found so far, and few of us actually took notes. We cried. We blew our noses. And we hugged a lot.
I never thought I was the only one dealing with this particular struggle, but the response I got to my confession overwhelmed me. I didn’t wake up that morning feeling particularly brave. I only intended to answer an honest question honestly. In an attempt to be authentic and accept the offered prayers of my sisters, I just laid it all out there.
And my long-held suspicions were confirmed. God writes his stories in our lives in personal ways, but doesn’t necessarily intend for them to be private.
I won’t share my personal struggle with you in this format - not just yet, though the day may come. God may ask me to write about this particular heartache one day, to detail the story of how he’s dealing with me so I can encourage others like my coffee shop friends. For now, I’ve decided the issue is best handled only in face-to-face conversations.
But with my Christian life going public, I see more than ever that God loves to use my personal stories in not-very-private ways. What he teaches me in intimate moments can have big impact on others when I’m brave enough to open the door on my personal life.
Which is nothing new. The Bible is full of examples of personal-but-not-private stuff.
I think most of King David who’s credited with 73 Psalms in our Bibles. The Psalms have been the worship songs of God’s people for thousands of years, sung in private and public worship for generations. That’s fine for things like Psalm 23 which describes God as a good shepherd caring for us, his flock. But what about when David gets busted for adultery with Bathsheba and then murdering her husband? That’s a pretty intense personal matter, wouldn’t you say? But wouldn’t you know, it makes it into the Psalms, too.
For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. (Psalms 51:1)
Now imagine going to a worship service and having your lowest moment embodied in song for everyone to see, hear, and sing back to God. I can’t imagine anything more public. Yet many of David’s personal moments make it into public worship through the Psalms. My quick survey of the headings gave me these:
Psalm 3 - when David fled from his son Absalom who tried to kill him and take his throne
Psalm 34 - when David pretended to be insane in front of Abimilech who drove him away
Psalm 56 - when the Philistines seized him in Gath
Psalm 57 - when David fled from King Saul into the cave
These are not David’s high points. Now, to be sure, David wrote plenty of Psalms of praise to God in times of victory and redemption. We expect that. It’s easy to go public with the good stuff in our lives and tuck the not-so-pretty in our back pockets. But I think David knew what I’m learning now, that his relationship with God and the things he learned in the both the highs and lows of life weren’t for him alone. His story, though intensely personal at times, wasn’t meant to be kept private. It was meant to be shared with the people of God.
Think of what our Bibles would look like if we got only the Instagram versions of our heroes. How would we know God restores us if we didn’t see Peter deny Jesus three times? How would God get credit for the great nation of Israel if we didn’t see the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lying, cheating, and stealing their way through the world? What would we lose if we didn’t see Jonah running away from God and ending up in the belly of a big fish?
And that’s just a few of the guys in Scripture. The gals have their fair share of personal moments I’m sure they would have rather kept quiet. Let’s start with the woman caught in adultery and dragged into the Temple courts to be thrown at Jesus’ feet, possibly naked as the day she was born. Not her shining moment, but in terms of God’s story in her life, arguably the most important, and one so many of us have learned from when we’re caught in our own shame. Jesus refuses to condemn her or us when we’re exposed, vulnerable, and flat-out guilty.
Take Sarah, for example. I wonder how happy she is knowing that our generation remembers when she convinced her husband to get her slave girl pregnant, and then abused the poor girl so badly that she risked a deadly journey through the desert because that sounded better than staying where she was. But that slave girl Hagar introduces us to El Roi, the God Who Sees Me, and Sarah’s missteps reveal new aspects of God’s character that encourage so many of us today.
You and I could put photo filters on our lives and share only the stuff that makes us look good. Or we could share the whole story of what God’s up to with the ugliness thrown in to make the picture complete. I’m betting folks will be far more encouraged and learn a lot more about the God we follow when we put even our most painful personal stories on display than they would if we decided to keep the hard stuff private.
And don’t even get me started on the whole idea that our spiritual lives in their entirety should be private matters, better kept at home and out of the public eye. That’s the biggest lie our enemy has ever sold us, and probably does more to keep the world around us ignorant of God and his ways than anything else. The devil shames us into believing that we can’t be loved if we’re fully known, that we’re so broken no one will get us or understand, or that others will ridicule us for struggling with THAT. But God says we’re already fully known and passionately loved, that he sees our brokenness and is making us new, and he’ll never ridicule us or turn us away. Friends, it’s so worth the risk to share with each other all of what God’s doing in our lives, the good stuff and the hard stuff. In this, we’ll find we’re not alone in whatever we’re dealing with, and we show others the amazing things God does despite - and even through - our faults, fears, and failures.
Let’s be honest. I sure hope my worst moments don’t end up in the hymnal someday, splattered across church screens for generations to come. It’s not likely they will. But if God gets kudos and other people know and trust him more because he picked me up and walked me through a messy season, then having my personal life out in public for others to see isn’t such a bad thing. I’m not espousing a voyeuristic attitude where we vomit all of our junk on social media. But I do hope we’ll all take the opportunities among God’s people to share our whole lives for better or for worse.
Your life with God and mine. Personal, but not private.