Can You Really Tell God Everything?

There’s an elephant in the room. I’m not sure how he got in or why we continue, in some instances, to allow him to stay. But he’s there, lurking in the back rows of our churches and in the corners of our minds, crushing our emotions under his enormous weight.

The elephant is this idea that in order to be a “good Christian” we must have all the “right” thoughts, and feel all the “right” feelings, and never ask the “wrong” questions. You know, those questions with no easy answers that make people squirm when say them out loud.

The elephant gasps when someone says, “I feel like God has let me down.” Or asks, “Does God even care?” The elephant wants us to edit our thoughts and sanitize our feelings to make them easier to explain away or ignore. He suggests that some questions are just inappropriate to voice to another living soul--let alone to God! And then proceeds to shame us into thinking that something must be hideously wrong with us if we’ve ever entertained such thoughts for even a moment.

And so, we come to the conclusion that good = unquestioning. That if we have questions or nagging doubts then we must be “bad.” And we should work really hard to ignore or stuff our questions, and anything else that’s hard to handle or explain, into a box.

But what happens when the box gets so full of pain, of wondering, of hurt, that you just can’t put one more thing inside? You either have to let it all out or you just give up on the box all together and walk away.

I’ve been there. I was convinced that good equaled unquestioning, that there was no room in a relationship with God for my questions and doubts, and I almost chucked the box altogether.

But it’s a lie.

Straight from hell.

Good does not equal unquestioning. The enemy of our soul wants to convince us that we can’t voice our true thoughts and feelings to God, that he somehow doesn’t care about our questions or would be offended by them! But God loves a sincere, genuine, honest question—and the person who asks it.
 The reason I know this idea to be a complete and utter lie from hell is because it creates distance between us and God, and God never wants us to be separated from him. Not even a little bit. If the enemy of your soul can make you feel like you need to hide anything about yourself from God then he’s succeeded at driving a wedge between you.

But God is fighting for us to be honest with him.

He’s tired of the lie that he can’t handle our real thoughts, our real feelings, our real imperfections. That he’s somehow indifferent to our suffering, and if something’s not going right in our life it’s because we’ve been disobedient, and he’s smugly waiting on the sidelines for us to figure it out and fix it before he’ll acknowledge us. He doesn’t work that way! Thank God!

He’s calling us out of hiding—we’ve been hiding since Adam and Eve in the garden. He's calling us to lay all the thoughts, questions, doubts, and all the feelings bare before him. It’s the only path to freedom! And the enemy knows it—that’s why he tries to keep us from doing it by heaping on shame and whispering lies like, “Good Christians don’t ask those questions. If you really loved God you wouldn’t be asking that.”

Alicia Britt Chole, in 40 Days of Decrease, deals with this ridiculous idea that Jesus was somehow immune to, or should have ignored, his human emotions when he was on earth as fully God and FULLY man! She writes:

“…in order for us to let Jesus be Jesus, we must make room in his life, and in our own, for a broader range of emotions and actions in our working definition of holy.” (75)

She adds,

“One of the reasons we must wrestle with the mystery of the Incarnation is because if we are not seasoned with wrestling, we tend to offer utterly unhelpful things to others and to ourselves, such as, ‘You shouldn’t cry, grieve, wail, or weep. God is in control. He works all things for the good of those who love him…so there’s no need to feel ____________.’ No one understood God’s goodness and control more than Jesus, and he still wept. Which means we can too.” (77)

She goes on to talk about the words of a popular Christmas carol, “Away in a Manger,” where they say of Jesus—“no crying he makes.” She says,

“He was not born with a halo. Of course he cried. Crying is not sin. Of course he did not have perfect backlit hair. Messy is not sin.” (77)

We’ve focused so much on God’s perfection that we’ve convinced ourselves that he can only deal with us once we’ve attained perfection too. The trouble is, we never will! We’ve forgotten that the good news of Jesus is that we don’t have to fix ourselves before we come to God. We can’t, and he knows it. That’s why he invites us to come just like we are—messy, flawed, and full of questions.

Messy is not sin!

Let that sink in.

And then take all of your feelings and questions to a God that specializes in messy and welcomes it—and you—without reserve! 

~Gut-Check and Action Steps~

1. Have you been sanitizing your feelings? Editing your thoughts? How can you break free from that?

2. How does the phrase “Messy is not sin” affect you? What do you think about it?

3. What are some areas where you’ve been hiding, whether out of fear or shame? Take those things, unedited, to God today!

another great resource for you

My new book, Praying is (not) Hard: Finally Let Go of the Baggage that Keeps You From Talking with God, is here! And it’s full of all of the tips and tools that helped me lay down guilt and shame and find freedom and joy in my conversations with God! You can find out more about the book here.

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