“Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working” James 5:16
Breaking the facade
When we’re not doing well, we don’t want other people to know it. We get quiet. We try to look fine. We don’t reveal the underlying mental conflict going on as we listen to our friend talk about her day. This only makes matters worse for us and keeps the people we say are our support system at an arm’s length.
For the past few months, my body and mind have been really sick. My health issues are in full force. My anxiety has taken a new, ugly turn. I’m in my second season of lining up all of my free time with appointments with various specialists. Being stressed only makes things worse and, unfortunately, being around other people is a major part of that stress at times.
Instead of keeping this all to myself and struggling alone, I have felt an intense encouragement from the Holy Spirit to embrace something new:
A severe honesty.
It’s not like I was trying to be dishonest before. But in this particular ongoing pain, I was uncharacteristically prone to hibernating. I wasn’t disclosing my battles mentally and physically to people as they were happening, even though sometimes the pain intensified while I was with them. I would maybe ask for prayer through an email or text and then by the time I saw them I would tidy everything up and update them. I didn’t even give them the chance to be supportive when I actually needed it.
In my personal time with Christ, I felt Jesus began to compel me to learn how to give myself to the body of Christ right in the middle of my struggle, right in the midst of the mess. He was teaching me that this was yet another area of my life to keep exposed to him and to other believers, instead of just staring at my pain. I need Jesus in my struggle and I need the body of Christ as he gifts them to encourage me by the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Father describes the church in Ephesians 4:15–16:
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
But in order to see another believer in Christ as a support beam, I needed to kick the part of me down that was trying to hold it all together by myself. Embracing honesty felt like the only option this time, and it made me feel more vulnerable and not with it than ever.
Freedom in obedience
I have to say that listening to Jesus about this was incredibly freeing. In fact, I felt like it even broke some of the strength of my sickness.
I showed up to my women’s bible study recently, with a lot of responsibilities for leading. As I ascended the stairs, both my body and my spirit seemed to fail me. I became increasingly paralyzed. I could have hid in a bathroom stall and prayed it passed, but as I spotted two ladies I know believe in the power of prayer and the reality of spiritual warfare, I made a beeline for them. They were deep in conversation but I took both of their hands and laid one on each of my shoulders and begged for their prayers that very instant.
These ladies were amazingly willing and supportive of me in the love of Christ. Afterwards, one of them embraced me for a few minutes, declaring truths into my ear through passionate tears, her heart burning with his very words for me. I know how much more affective my anxiety would have become if we had just chitchatted and in the back of my mind I had endured the increasing panic all alone.
I was able to face that day, and many others, by the grace of God and with the help of believers in Christ, and overcome my spiritual, mental, and physical battles.
I have never felt so needy as I have in this season.
In embracing honesty, God has asked me to embrace real people in front of me. I love Paul’s compelling abandon in relationships when he says, “We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange—I speak as to my children—open wide your hearts also” (2 Cor. 6:12–13, NIV).
Right now, in the urgency, I have needed people who are willing to go straight to what hurts. Layers beneath chatting about movie previews and what we ate for lunch that day, my brothers and sisters in Christ are learning how to just go there when needed. And not after months and years of getting to know me—because pain has attached itself to me in the now. The Lord’s visible, tangible graces to me are his servants around me. They are praying for me. When I stumble, they grab my arms to steady me. They remind me of truth. They go with me. They back me up. They believe I will be more than a conqueror because of Jesus Christ.
Continually compelled by the heart of Jesus, I want to abandon the desire to isolate today and give verbal updates on my life tomorrow. Because maybe embracing the exposure will free me to be blessed and will free another believer to trust God in that moment for what they feel they can’t give me without his help.
So we throw our wrapped arms off our personal crisis and open them wide to the hope God has for us in the embrace of honesty.
