I was {almost} almost honest.

I’ll be honest:
I’m never honest.

Except today I was.

Someone hurt my feelings. Not intentionally. In the way that everybody seems to hurt feelings these days: cancelled plans.

You know that moment. That moment you get a text message from someone you have plans with in a few days and you know before you even open it. Game called on account of some hypothetical rain. Something came up. The worst is when you can understand, right? It sucks when you can imagine yourself in that situation and definitely see why you would cancel plans.

But it still hurts your feelings. If you are anything like me {and I pray that nobody is in this way}, it makes you question your worth. “Obviously I’m not funny enough…” or “if I were more ______, I’d bet they wouldn’t have cancelled….”

Right? That sucks.

So that’s where I was at last night. Staring that ugly text message in the face, I pulled out the mother of all lies, a mama I’m close with. It comes in two forms: a quick version and a wordier version:

no worries

don’t worry about it.

Lies. All lies.

But really, this story starts on Monday night. The night the plans were made.

Jim Sparks taught Bible study on Monday. About love. He gave 4 enemies of love: envy, selfishness, scorekeeping & fear. At the end we picked one we face the most and stood in the center of a circle, with our friends praying for us.Â Guess which one I picked?

If you picked scorekeeping, I give you a point.
{heh…}

Buechner said it best when he said…
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

I know, right? So true.

Back to today. It’s been a rough day for me, in a variety of ways. Lots of people being honest with me.

As I was writing this post about how I am not really honest, I couldn’t help but think of how that aids in my score keeping problem. Just one more wrong done to me that I “selflessly” wrote off in an attempt to not upset the other person.

I called B.S. on myself, went to Facebook, wrote a message… cried while I wrote it because I am a sissy, and sent it. It never said “don’t worry about it” or “you are a terrible person” or “please make me the center of your universe!” It just explained the context of my decision to be upfront, stated the facts about how I am feeling, and made sure they knew I still loved them.

and it feels like some terrible monster that’s been rapidly growing inside of me has been put to death.

Well there’s that.