Our greatest secrets remain our heaviest burdens.

We shackle ourselves when we refuse vulnerability.

We harm our souls when we fail to create havens for authenticity.

The narrow road to freedom is strewn with thorns.

The demands of our faith are high. The rewards, infinitely greater. We deceive ourselves when we hold to an easy spirituality, to a hobby faith. Our experience of Christ deepens with our surrenders, our failings, our vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability is not immediately rewarding.

It’s terrifying, it demands our pride in image, reputation and self be sacrificed. It demands persistent risk. It demands lonely sojourns into the depths of hearts. It demands our surrender to something unfathomably greater than our ego.

I gave up not so long ago
So steal my heart and take the pain
and wash the feet and cleanse my pride
take the selfish, take the weak,
and all the things I cannot hide
take the beauty, take my tears
the sin-soaked heart and make it yours
take my world all apart
take it now, take it now (Worlds Apart – Jars of Clay).

Accountability is ineffective without vulnerability.

When we hold each other to our projected images, to general confessions, to half-hearted service we experience neither the depth of grace nor the cleansing sting of truth. We fail to live for something greater.

Above all, vulnerability demands both courage and humility.

There are land mines: unsafe people. Ill-timed truth.

Yet, we cannot quit. We must press on with a vision of something greater. Someone Greater.

“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion,  then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,  not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” – Philippians 2:1-4

If our vision is small our sacrifice will be small.

If our fear is great our vulnerability will be restricted.

If our pride consumes us our authenticity will be non-existent.

In the place where truth and grace are fused vulnerability is born.

Truth without grace is legalism. A suffocating faith.

Grace without truth is relative belief.  An insignificant faith.

Truth married to grace is the path to surrender. To Christ. To vulnerable living. To communal grace.

There where grace and truth meet, and only there, can the broken self can be embraced. There the soul need not stand on its own merit. There our battles can be admitted. There truth can be absorbed – it no longer crushes the broken soul. There grace isn’t a Christian buzzword, it is life, it’s everything worth having. There is both;

death and life.

pain and joy.

suffering and hope.

tears and laughter.

trial and strength.

There is the Power to fight battles we may engage in for life.

There is the Courage to reveal our souls.

There is Hope.

Our greatest secrets remain our heaviest burdens.

We shackle ourselves when we refuse vulnerability.

We harm our souls when we fail to create havens for authenticity.