Dear Friends,
As I have mentioned a few times recently, I am doing some coaching with Doug Schaupp who created the 5 Thresholds videos we watched last year. Doug has been teaching me how to help Coast more effectively share Jesus with our friends and neighbors. One thing Doug talks a lot about is sharing our weaknesses and failures. This builds trust, opens the door for deeper conversations, and allows Jesus to take center stage as the one who is able to help us in our weakness. In fact, on a chart that our evangelism vision team has been using to help us pray for people in our networks, one of the boxes next to each person's name is the question, "What is one weakness you can share with them? Ask them to pray for you."
Sharing our weaknesses also came up in my discussion group at church last Sunday when we were talking about the question, "Christians are hypocrites. They go to church, act like they’re nice people, but they don’t live it out when you get to know them. What’s the point?" (If you missed it, we talked about how we are all hypocrites, how the first step in becoming a Christian is to admit to our hypocrisy, and how the church functions as a support group for recovering hypocrites.) Someone at my table mentioned that some of our friends and neighbors who are not Christians are under the impression that we think we have it all together and that this makes us seem especially hypocritical rather than like recovering hypocrites. I went home on Sunday still thinking about this concern. I, for one, don't mean to act as if I have everything together. But, I suspect my non-Christian friends have some pre-conceived notions about the self-righteousness of Christians which may be exacerbated by real reticence on my part to share my weaknesses.
I've been asking myself this week if I hide my weaknesses and failures, and if so, why. I suspect I do and that I do so for a variety of reasons. One is simply the common human desire to look good in front of others. Another is certainly that it is more socially acceptable not to speak of unpleasant things like one's failings. And I suspect that yet another is some sense that, as a Christian, I aught to seem like I have it all together. To the extent that this is true of me, it poses a significant barrier to sharing the good news with others because I am not presenting myself as a recovering hypocrite but simply as a hypocrite. Even if I'm being overly self-critical at this present moment, and I am actually not particularly reticent to share my weaknesses, if I do nothing to counter the pre-conceptions of my non-Christian friends, they will not have the chance to find out that the church is meant to be a community of recovering hypocrites and will likely continue to assume that we are self-righteous instead. With this in mind, it is perhaps extremely important for me and for Christians in general to go around deliberately telling people about our weaknesses and our failures.
I intend to give this a try and see how it goes. Would you like to try with me? I think I will start looking for opportunities in conversations with friends to share about something I have recently failed at or that I am working on about myself, not in a self-disparaging way, but casually, as I would talk about anything else. I'd like to see what conversations this may spark, how I might grow personally, and how it might help the reputation of the church.
A prayer for today:
God, I confess to you that I am a hypocrite. My actions don't always line up with my beliefs and values, and I tend to judge others more harshly than myself. Forgive me, help me to see clearly, and help me to grow in faithfulness to the values you are teaching me. Help me not to hide my weaknesses but to be open and honest about them in a way that makes other people feel comfortable sharing their weaknesses and that makes space for your goodness and your grace to shine in my life. Amen.
Love in Christ,
Michelle
