Honesty

What I've written for my talk so far:

Something that I try to be is real and honest. Doing so has always been difficult for me - I've always been really good at keeping people just close enough that they feel they know me, at the same time keeping them far enough away that they don't really know me very well at all. In the process of writing this talk, I realized that if I was going to do it, I had to be real, true, honest, vulnerable... all of those things that have been, to some extent, the absolute & complete opposite of who I am to the world. So there are bound to be some surprises as I go along. You might be shocked at some of the things that I've done or that are a big part of who I am, but hopefully some of the things that have been confusing for you in the past will start to make sense now. The background of this talk is that I started out wanting to write about faith & crises of faith, because that's such a big issue and a lot of peple I know have been struggling with that lately. But I wanted it to be more a testimony than a "here's how to stay close to God" thing, so I started reading through my journals. I've been keeping a journal for 15 years. When I got to 1996, I realized that the same themes were coming up again and again, and that if I was going to do justice to the work God's been doing in my life, then I would have to pay attention to those themes and talk about my life in relation to them. Never have I had such a difficult time with writing something down.