Liar. Liar. (Sunday Thoughts Link Up #37)
GENESIS 3:8-13
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
When I was little I would tell my friends that a whale lived in the deep end of the pool. It had been known to surge out of the drain when it sensed humans paddling near. I got the deep end to myself.
Once, as an eleven-year-old, when a friend and I got lost on our bikes on a sandy path on an island in Florida, I narrated, via NCIS voice, what was happening or might happen in the news report about our lives. We laughed until it got a little too real and pumped our legs as fast as we could back to reality.
I love spinning stories, seeing how the world can be malleable with just a spoonful of imagination. I still do it for my kids. I narrate our lives. That cracked in half tree has a story behind it if you listen. I think Winnie the Pooh came out of there. He stopped by the house this morning. He said honey is the perfect thing for your toast.
But, these stories are different than lies, lies that choke the life out of life. I believe God created me as a writer of non-fiction, specifically faith-based non-fiction, for a reason. He wanted me to find the story in the life that I live that is true.
There are so many kinds of lies:
-Lies to keep you comfortable.
-Lies to keep your distance.
-Lies to keep your secrets.
-Lies of omission.
-Lies of misdirection.
(Adam was great at this last one: Not me, he said. It was the woman. And you, God, because you gave her to me. There were fingers pointing every which way but at himself.)
The stories I spun as a kid were mostly for fun. I was populating the background of life with my own scenery, an additional scene here, a pop of color (Bob Ross-style) there. The stories I spin now for my kids are the same. They shake up their imaginations so they can fizz over with new possibilities. But the truth I tell in my writing is the truth I seek in my life.
We have to be honest with the world. We have to say how we feel. We can’t always be “fine.” We have to open the windows and doors and let out the bugs that crawl in with the secrets. We have to remember that honesty is often harder but always better. We have to share with those we trust the things about us we think we need to cover over. It always feels better. Always.
And when you think about it, there are so many truths that need to be told, about ourselves and about the world, we don’t really have time for the lies.
Sunday Thoughts Link Up!
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
