Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.
James 5:16
Sometimes honest confession can seem astonishing, impossible, and dangerous. Because we have learned silence so well, we experience honesty as full of risk. After all, if we are honest, then other people will know what we think and feel. We will be exposed. The appearance of strength and competence we work so hard to cultivate will have to share the stage with our weaknesses, our failings, our sins.
When we practice honesty as a daily discipline, however, something happens to us. The promise of this text begins gradually to grow in our lives. We begin to heal. It is not a dramatic, once-for-all-time, quick-fix kind of healing. Nor is it a private healing, a healing that happens only ‘inside’ our heads or in secret with God.
Honesty leads to healing because people can now express their love for us in practical ways. Honesty leads to healing because we no longer have to pay the high tariffs that pretense demands. We heal because the experience of acceptance counteracts the contempt we so easily heap on ourselves. We heal because we are no longer alone. We heal because we are known and loved.
Honesty is a discipline with a promise. We will be healed.
Lord, give me the humility and
the courage
to practice confession today.
Heal me as I do the work of honesty.
Amen.
© Dale and Juanita Ryan
This meditation is from Rooted in God’s Love by Dale and Juanita Ryan. A copy of this book can be purchased HERE
Would you like to receive one of these meditations each day by email?
Enter your email address:You must also enter a password. This provides only mild security, but should prevent others from messing with your subscription. We suggest not using a valuable password because if you forget it, we will email it back to you in cleartext (i.e. unencrypted).
Pick a password:
Reenter password to confirm:
IMPORTANT! Because so many people have subscribed to this daily meditation, some email services presume that our emails are spam. If you do not receive them in your inbox, check in your spam folders. If they are not there, contact your email service provider to inquire why you are not receiving them. The meditations are sent from: nacrmed@nacr.org. This is the email address to add to a “white list” if you are able to do that.