Since I became a Christian many years ago, one of my greatest desires has been to transparently demonstrate to others that God is living in my life. Let me tell you how this desire came about.
When I was in primary school, the notion of “secrets” started to intrigue me. Within a year, I was curious about all kinds of stuff! At the time, we lived in an old Victorian vicarage, and my parents gave me a whole attic as a playroom. One day, while pacing and larking about, I detected a loose floorboard. So, what do you think I did then? Well, I got a screwdriver and lifted it – as anybody would! And what a boon that cavity between floors turned out to be! A safe place, at last, to keep my boxful of top-secret items away from the prying eyes of parents – and the rest of the wide world!
One of the secrets I had obtained was the formula for making gunpowder (copied from a Victorian encyclopaedia, if I remember). Another secret was how to get girls to fall in love with me (copied from a long-forgotten source – and I’m still trying to make that one work for me!).
And yet…within days of stashing my secrets under that floorboard, I started to feel unhappy. After all, what would happen if I was found out?
Now most of us, I guess, have secret habits, or suppressed memories, or unspoken desires, that we would never voluntarily share with another living soul. And we pretend to ourselves that they don’t matter…until each of these secrets start to create a centre of disturbance within our minds.
And very many of us carry these secrets for years, forcing them to the back of the mind in an attempt to reduce their power over us, or to achieve some sense of forgiveness for ever having harboured them. In short, we come to believe that we must live with them for our entire lives.
And yet we don’t need to! You see, there is a way to deal with disturbing secrets, and that is…to give them away! The basic formula is: Approach someone who already knows the meaning of God’s forgiveness, and who will support you in seeking it – a good friend, for instance, or a trusted authority figure. And then, when you’ve found your trusted confidant(e), you open your heart to them in the Presence of God.
When both of your, on your knees, hand the disturbing secrets over to God, the sense of liberation will be almost unbelievable in its intensity – and so much easier than you might ever have thought!
The happiest people I have ever known are those who (against expectation, in most cases) have achieved deliverance from their disturbing secrets by sharing them. And I don’t mean sharing one secret only. It has to be everything.
Once we have shared everything, in the Presence of God, we become transparent – because there’s no longer anything in our souls that we are afraid for others to see. It is only by filling our lives with open, God-like thoughts that we can we rise above the fear of unwitting disclosure.
So now you know how my desire for transparency came about. It’s no longer a secret!
