One of Satan’s greatest lies is this: “You are alone.”
It makes me want to punch him in the face, the jerk.
It makes his job really easy when he isolates us and gets us to believe that we are the only ones, we are abandoned, we are forgotten. When we start to believe that, we start to act it out and it impacts, well, everything.
One of the words Amanda and I got when we were praying over W Squad was “Unity.” As we’ve been walking through this journey, I’ve seen that unity play out in a number of ways. We are unified in the Spirit. We are the unified Church, the Body that represents Jesus to this world.
More than that, however, we are unified in our brokenness.
One of the first nights at launch in the beginning of September, we sat as a squad and confessed the secret sins we’ve struggled with and the lies we’ve believed. It was powerful and moving as men and women who had been bound by lies and darkness brought these secrets into the light. I lost count of the times I heard, “I’ve never told anybody this before, but….” Their courage to speak out their wounds and failures gave courage to others to speak out as well.
I realized something that night: without vulnerability, there cannot be unity.
I clearly remember the moment this first broke loose in my own life. It was May of 2010 and I was sitting outside in a compound in Kabul, Afghanistan. I was telling my testimony for the first time and I came to a crucial point. I paused, aware that I had a decision to make in that moment. My first option was to gloss over the truth of my past, the sin I had embraced, and my wounds and give a false version of myself to the team. Option two was to tell them. Everything. To be raw and real and honest and speak out the hideous things I had never given voice to before.
I chose Option Two. And I cried the entire time in my brokenness and shame and pain. But through that night, I experienced a freedom that I had never known I could have (and also the dreaded “vulnerability hangover” the next morning).
Lack of vulnerability leads to secret lives and false identities. It causes us to hold our true selves back from those around us and feeds into fear of rejection. It causes us to put an unhealthy emphasis on the opinions of others and to mold ourselves into being who we think they want us to be. It’s not true unity and it’s not true identity.
Vulnerability for me today looks differently than it did before. My present struggle with vulnerability is putting words to my emotions and inviting others into how I’m feeling. I’ve always been afraid of large displays of emotions, of the violent outbursts I’ve often witnessed. I became really good at stuffing my feelings away, compartmentalizing them, or straight up denying them. These days, being vulnerable is sharing unashamedly with those in my sacred circle how I’m feeling even if it doesn’t make sense and I don’t know why.
I can promise you this: that you are not alone. Those shameful secrets and sins that you’ve struggled with are the same secrets and sins that someone else struggles with as well. If you can find the courage to speak those out, you will find unity and intimacy and the truth that you are surrounded by other broken people who, by the grace of God, are being redeemed.
