Honesty is necessary - is it possible? ...

Tuesday, Oct 16, 2012. We need honesty. Without honesty you cannot trust someone. You cannot live when you do not have a minimum of honesty in your life - towards yourself and towards others. You need to know that others are honest as well! But is honesty always possible and always good?

Honesty is needed … is it always good?

First, is honesty always possible? Until some years ago, I thought that it is and should be always possible. I thought there would be a path through life where you could tell the truth with all you say, where you treat rules in an honest way and act reliably. But I have learned that there our public systems are not without contradictions. There are contradicting rules and contradicting demands. When you are honest to all sides, you basically violate all rules and bring the system into a lot of trouble. If you take some of our systems serious, you cannot work in them any more. You need a kind of relaxed mode of operation … which is a conflict, indeed. You need to try to search for the best benefit for the system, and to do so ignore some of its conflicting ingredients - no way around it.

Second, is honesty always good? Some years ago we had some people in our church who fought for authenticity. Authenticity sounds a good goal: be who you are. Yes, initially we were all excited and enthusiastic about that. But then some of our group used the argument of “autenticity” to tell others quite negative things. When they had problems with some behavior, when they did not like something or someone, they thought they have to tell the other person. But that led to insult and many problems. Openness is good, but complete openness which is unbalanced and insulting is not good at all. I had to rethink my positive ideas about autenticity … without balance it is nothing!

Honesty in the bible …

We cannot separate honesty and openness from the Lord. God is always open and honest with us. The bible shows a strong degree of openness. Humans are presented with all their strength and their failures. The bible is truely honest with us!

But part of the biblical honesty is also the insight that mankind is not good. We do not have the loving heart which God has. We are not as dedicated, that we would die for the failures of our enemies. We are full of hatred, and we see other people in a way which is not adequate, many times every day. So in the light of this insight, is it good if we show all this to others all the time? No, it is not good. We should not be too honest with our thoughts, just because we will hurt others with honesty at the wrong place and time. We need to combine honesty with love - otherwise we generate many unnecessary problems.

I am longing for deep honesty, for relationships which are based on it. I am longing for openness, to share my enthusiams and my fears. I can share it with the Lord, in its full depth and breadth. And I can share parts of it with others, … with care! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts