Everything built on a lie falls. Just give it time.

Matthew 7:26-27     The Message (MSG)
26-27 “….you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.”

My daughter Katie is super sharp. She’s so sharp that it gets her into trouble. She struggles more with lying than my other girls because she knows how to get away with it… for awhile at least. Her dad is also pretty sharp and intuitive about when someone is telling the truth and never lets it go, so that helps.

Katie makes inner decisions. This can be an amazing thing IF it is developed in the right way.

Example: she knew I wasn’t crazy about those scholastic book orders, mostly because who reads books anymore? And also I hate paper and hate being handed paper with words on them I’m supposed to read. Lists. Numbers. Uggh.

Whatever. I’m her father and can be weird if I want to.

Now as the girls grow up we let them handle more and more money which means letting them fail from time to time. Katie understands money waaay better than Neela. Neela understands FUN. One dollar and a million are all the same to her. Why would she care? As long as she has FUN! (She recently actually saved enough to buy an iPod so we’re all very proud of her. I think mom just took all her money and put it in a bank account just to help out:)

Katie saw a secret spy book in the book order, took the right amount of money, filled out the form properly, got her book and no one was the wiser until I happened across it in her bedroom one day.

The fact that I found anything in a bedroom with way too many things in it and picked up the book in the first place can only be attributed to a higher power. I asked “Katie, what’s this?”

You can always tell when a child is a little proud of what they did but also ashamed about it. Did she get in trouble? Not really. It’s hard not to admire the way she went about it. Casual yet smart. It was her money in the end and no one could say she was specifically told NOT to, so…

Also her grandma could give her more than enough ammo about a slightly obsessive dad in regards to getting what he wanted. Would Katie know how to blackmail me? Yes she would.

Here’s how our lives work. We do stupid stuff then try to hide it, hoping it will never catch up with us. We tell ourselves that we don’t want to say what really happened because it will hurt the people we love, but we’ve been saying that for so long we actually believe it.

I’m not speaking of little harmless things but somethings more damaging that we’ve simply convinced ourselves over time are harmless.

Why don’t we call it when we know someone is lying to us?
Simple.
Because we’re lying too and don’t want to get caught.

“But everyone has secrets Pastor Corey!”
I don’t. Not anymore.

Here’s something I know from extremely painful experience. All of the reasons you’ve convinced yourself that you need to hide something from someone creates a dual part of you that will eventually destroy your bond. Here’s why: there can’t be a bond if you have a secret.

Don’t try and build anything in the dark, it will come down.
Don’t try to build trust on a lie. It will come down.
Don’t you dare tell yourself you’re “doing it for them” because you’re not. You’re doing it for YOU. You want to keep that piece of your life for yourself.

Over time they’ll be able to feel the disconnect. You won’t be able to keep the one room a secret because it begins to create other attached rooms. Another entire life, in fact.

You will have two lives.
With one you will sincerely love them.
With one you will have secrets.

But is it really love if they don’t know the real you?

Don’t you long for someone who would know the real you and not throw you out? I know you do.

“But they WOULD throw me out if I told them about THAT!!”

They might. They might. Don’t know how else to say it.. You’ll spend your entire life running from that fear until you walk right through the middle of it and out the other side.

There’s nothing you could say to God to make Him hate you. If you’re lucky enough to be married to a Christ follower I’ll bet you could be forgiven. Do you suppose they don’t know something is wrong? Do you suppose they can’t feel like you’ve never truly come on board? When one person is in and the other has options and secrets, who is it who has already decided the relationship never had a chance in the first place?

I think you need to man up and do what you should have done a long time ago.

Jesus said that marriage is when 2 become 1 in the sight of God. Before that will ever work you need to do one thing…

Take your public and your private life and make them one life.

Messy? Yes. Real? Yes. Finally YES!

“But so far I’ve been able to hide the real me”

Sweetheart listen. If it doesn’t come out now it will kill your relationship when it does. Wake up. You watch it happen all the time and you know in your gut that it will.

You could survive if you:
Stop.
Say “I no longer care more about MY image than I care about THEM. I’m not deciding up front that they could never forgive me anymore.”
Send them a text that says “I need to tell you something and I’m afraid to do it”
Pray and find strength in God until they come home.

The only thing it will cost you is your image. Not with people.. the image you’ve been believing about yourself.
James 5:16 “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed”