The Best Policy

“Your second year is harder than your first.”

This is what a close friend said to my wife and I when he and his wife asked how married life was going. I was not at all irritated for what might seem like a harsh or jaded forecast. He did not say it as one who pretended to know everything about marriage. He simply spoke as one who had walked the trail a while and who loved us enough to speak the truth. In fact, I loved my friend more for saying it.

Honesty is a rare commodity. Or perhaps it is not so much rare as it is neglected. Unspoken truths can pile up like dusty boxes, cluttering our hearts.

Mostly, helpful honesty goes unspoken because “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.” It is very easy to confuse “I’m hurting them” with the more accurate notion, “The truth can hurt”. But that’s just the thing: the truth is true no matter how we feel telling it. The hurt of honesty can be the antiseptic sting of cleaning a wound. If you see your sister harming herself because she has not weighed the consequences of her actions or because she simply is unaware of how her actions are hurting others, shouldn’t something be said regardless of her reaction? If it were you, wouldn’t you want to know?

People are afraid of honesty’s sting, however, because it can most certainly become a weapon when not employed in a spirit of love or in concern for another’s welfare. I knew one person who refused to restrain his harmful opinions about others with the throw-away phrase, “Well, I’m just being honest.” Actually, he was being opinionated, unkind, and rude. It was not spoken to offer to help but harm. But at the same time, no one called him on it.

When one is on the receiving end of honesty (even the constructive kind), often one immediately feels attacked. A common, knee-jerk reaction to honesty is to defend oneself. Criticism threatens something important to us and we naturally rush to shield it from harm. Honesty moves directly toward our emotional treasures and we are left little time to react. Instinct usually takes over and we simply brace for impact. So again, we are afraid to deal in it.

And yet, honesty can be a tool of profound freedom. Honesty sheds light and opens the shutters into one's heart. It reveals things hidden from view. The absence of honesty is obscurity. Dishonesty breeds obscurity in that it blurs or distorts the truth. Our perception of a given subject is shaped by how honest or dishonest we are about the matter. Unhappiness in marriage persists because of a lack of honest communication that confesses hurt and a refusal to receive news of harm we have caused. Without that honesty, things fester, become infected until the sinew and tissue are damaged of one's marriage feels beyond repair. Nothing left to do but amputate. Honesty has the power to wipe away obscurity; to clean out the infection. And with that better information gained from improved vision, we are more prepared to weather the difficulties.

Of course, the effectiveness of honesty is directly proportionally to one’s willingness to receive it. As I said before, the instinctive reaction to honesty is defense. However, when we trust someone enough to know that their assessment is not meant in cruelty but shared in a spirit of love and concern, we can slow down enough to receive their thoughts as a gift. If you had something hanging from your nose or you were experiencing a revealing wardrobe malfunction that you had yet to notice, would you not want your friend to be direct enough to (privately) draw your attention to the oversight? Or would you get offended that they noticed what was glaringly obvious to everyone else in the room?

Perhaps the most difficult honesty to handle is being honest with oneself; to be willing to look in the mirror and accept what is there, both the well-groomed parts and the hidden warts and defects we hide from the world. As Christians, this is a fundamental practice (we call it "reflection"), not only for our brothers and sisters in the faith, but for our own spiritual well-being as well. We must be willing to be honest enough with our short-comings to acknowledge our deepest need for Jesus. Until we are, why bother with Jesus at all?

It is no throw-away title when Jesus calls himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Jesus’ life is punctuated by moments of blunt, yet life giving honesty. He is not afraid to tell the Pharisees how their legalistic religiosity has imprisoned the lives of the people in spiritual check-lists and not freed them to live with God (Matthew 23:1-7). The admonition to “take the log out of your own eye” is done so that “you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matt. 7:3) We are Jesus to one another when we tell the truth in love.

Any life-giving freedom born from honesty is a testimony to Jesus, Himself, and the freedom He longs to give from all the forms of sin and death. Jesus defeats anything that imprisons. He removes any obscurity or dishonesty that seeks to undo. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” says Paul. Once we can become more comfortable with being honest with ourselves, we can accept Jesus’ honest criticism of the things we continue to do that keep us away from knowing Him more. Because Jesus wants to give us freedom, He points His finger at the things we need to change (not necessarily a change from bad to good, but also good to better!). Jesus’ brand of honesty is never about harming, but pruning the dead places to make room for more life and growth. And once we’ve learned how from Jesus’ gracious hand, we’ll find the courage and freedom to share the gift of constructive honesty with those around us.

I’m glad our friend loved us enough to speak the truth about marriage. And I know that, whatever trials may away us, we are more prepared for our second year of marriage because of it.