I find Jesus has me either way … First I’m bashful about showing my light, having learned too well, too early, to hide in the back row—never volunteer for anything my father said. Let me be smug but let it be in secret. But then he gets me from the other direction: secrets. There is so much I want to keep hidden: secret shames, failures little and large, a pettiness.
How is it I can be both? Hiding both my light and my dark?
I guess it is the hiding itself I’m addicted to: Saves all kinds of trouble. My measuring out is strictly measured, quality-controlled and inspected for accidental abundance. At least that’s my default setting. But there’s a yearning in me too, source only suspected, a longing to let go, to live large, to sing my secrets like gifts, … to blaze out warm and wasteful.
Because the fire, smothered, grows cold, the secret, hidden, festers, and what you think you are protecting, all along, dies quietly un-mourned.
But stir it, feed it, and the fire cannot be contained. Tell it, shout it, and the secret fly free. Safety is open-handed.
I see that in others and it gets me yearning. But, more importantly, Jesus sees it in me and that, I reckon, is what makes the difference.