The best things in life are free....

...this, for example!

Honesty and openness

Living with an attitude of honesty and openness is very important. Some thoughts I've been pondering...

Honesty requires faith
If you are going to be honest, there are times that you are going to have to admit both your frailty and your sinfulness; admit you're not God and admit you're not good at being human. It is only when you can trust God to be God that you can relax and be a joyful human and it is only when you trust Jesus to fully pardon that you can walk in the light which exposes sin. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. ~ 1 John 1:6-7

Getting over yourself
If you are going to be honest, you are going to have to acknowledge that other people are equals. You will acknowledge that you don't have to suffer as some sort of martyr whose exquisite thoughts of joy and sorrow (that undoubtedly adorn your heart at every moment) are too precious to intimate to the crude and unsensitive hoi poloi. You are going to have to realise that maybe not all your profundities are pearls, and maybe not everyone else is a pig. Simply put, you have to be sensible enough to realise that we're all pilgrims on the same journey, with the same struggles and in God's sight, we're all the same. If you can give help with your words, do so. If you need help, ask. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. ~ 1 John 1:2-3

Discretion: you have to be honest about God
In other words, you have to (again) acknowledge your frailty. You are not God. There are some things that are none of your business and as you don't make the rules, you have to abide by His. You have no right to betray confidences, for example. Additionally, you're not really interesting enough to bore everyone with every emotion you've experienced since birth. You have to be honest about the fact that telling some people some things in some settings is dishonest, because it may be giving impressions that you don't want to give. Because the point is not self-disclosure or yet hiddenness. It's about serving God. It's just that serving God entails being humble, not patronising others, giving others help and receiving it.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. ~ 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Thoughts about how this works out practically?

We might be more holy if we "forgave" less often...

...in so far as if we took the time to take off the garb of the martyr and stop thinking pious "forgiving" thoughts, we might actually find that there is nothing to forgive, and that our woundedness stems from our own sin problem as expressed in touchiness.

Seeing as a part of holiness is being willing to acknowledge our own sin...