The Intimacy of Honesty
Kaitlyn Lambert // UGA Student & Community Outreach Intern
The other night, I was driving around the back-roads of Watkinsville with a friend, and I burned a whole quarter-tank of gas. I didn’t have a GPS up, it was past ten, and I was taking random turns while rambling every thought I was having–for like, two hours straight.
She sat in my passenger seat, making thoughtful comments every now and again, but mostly listening in the cool dark of my car. I cannot impress upon you how much I was rambling. I was coming off a hard week, bouncing from topic to topic, throwing things off my chest. I had so many thoughts and feelings. Some of them unfair, many of them human, and all of them as raw and unresolved as they are before I verbally process them. Ill-practiced, awkward, uncomfortable.
At eighteen, this would have been one of those conversations I never would have had with anyone except God Himself. At nineteen, I would have cherry-picked the more palatable aspects of my struggles and spoon-fed them to a select panel. At twenty, I would have gone on a walk by myself and tried to run away from my own brain. Twenty-one, I would have probably had this conversation. But I would have woken up ashamed and embarrassed of proving my imperfection to another human being. Trying to deal with my own humanness between the Lord and I alone, not wanting others to know me as I know me.
At twenty-two, I shared with a friend my feelings, and they were not pretty. While missing turns and fumbling words, I said the kind of silly things you say when it’s winter, and you’re tired, and you feel your emotions so deeply, before you have a good night’s sleep and breakfast and realize that it’s not as world-ending as it felt before. My friend listened, spoke God over me. And after, I dropped her off at her house, went back to my own, and woke up to a new day with even better mercies. All for the cost of a quarter-tank. I was already feeling and thinking. Just then, another human being knew about it, and in turn knew me. And loved me even more. All for the cost of vulnerability.
In 2013, the New York Times published Tim Kreider’s famous op-ed, “I Know What You Think of Me.” In it, he talks about insecurities and other people’s witness of those insecurities, of “loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity.”
What’s most relevant here is the end. “Years ago,” writes Kreider, “a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
We, who are wounded and naked and broken little things, cannot know honest love without honest life. Life in community, life in the sharing of burdens and the fracture of our own pride. We are messes of our own making. We time our jokes poorly and no one laughs. We leave our plates behind in the kitchen and make our roommates clean it up. We dance very badly and don’t always know the lyrics to songs we’re singing. We don’t ask how our friends are doing nearly often enough. And we have, at times, been hurt by people in gut-wrenching ways and are weak enough to need a car ride to fix it.
To head back to the Bible, I think often of the heart-break of Genesis 3:9-10: “But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’”
What always gets me here is that their nakedness existed whether they hid or not. And God knew about their nakedness whether they hid or not. But they hid from God and, paradoxically, from each other.
There are no fig leaves between us. Not truly. We either walk down the staircase of “being known,” or we linger uncomfortably near the door-way, and either way we are not invulnerable. Our nakedness exists regardless. Our sin, our mistakes, our personality quirks, our rough edges, our goofy phrases, our bad outfits, our lateness to church services, our lazy love, our hypocrisy and cognitive-dissonance and forgetfulness and inescapable humanness in what it means to be a believer that is sanctified every day until death or resurrection–it’s all there, but bleeding us out in the hiding. A horrible, losing game of masquerade that no one has ever won.
This is a lesson I have learned bitterly. Unwillingly, even now. I ask myself a lot these days, What do I gain by not being honest? And I’ve yet to come up with an answer that matches how much easier it is to breathe when you just…share what you’re struggling with. Love with the boldness of a kid. Confess your mistakes and let other people give you grace. Get in the car, go on the drive, and stop making a home out in the hidden places.
Paul begged the church at Corinth for vulnerability too: “Dear, dear Corinthians, I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” (2 Corinthians 6:11-13).
Right now, God is teaching me how to widen my heart and open up my life. To my friends, to my family, to my church, to neighbors and baristas and drivers that sit next to me at the red-light and watch me air-drum to Imagine Dragons even though Imagine Dragons is approximately a decade off-trend. (I’m embarrassed. But I drum anyway.)
Right now, this “wide-open, spacious life” is for us as image-bearers.
Lord, let us enter it.
I hope to meet you there, authentic and real and with all your heart on the line.
Kaitlyn Lambert is a Community Outreach intern at Watty. She just graduated from UGA with a degree in English and is now pursuing her Master in Public Affairs at UGA. Her favorite hobbies are playing pickleball, writing poetry, and talking theology. As a part-time job, she woodworks and likes to imagine Jesus woodworking too. Last year she went to 7 national parks in 14 days, and her 2024 goal is to go to the Hawaiian National Parks!
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