Confessing My Sin and Other Terrifying Things
There’s an episode of the much-beloved show This is Us wherein (no big spoilers, don’t worry!) Randall and Beth—the married couple viewers love to love—are fighting. In the stress and strain of trying to launch their respective careers, they both bristle with anger, each feeling unseen, underappreciated, less than loved.
In a fit of pique, Randall leaves Beth a nasty voicemail, degrading her efforts to follow her passion for dance by pursuing work as a ballet instructor. With a tone dripping in sarcasm, he says he understands it’s so important that she teach “bored housewives how to twirl.”
Later the same night, she calls him on his cruelty, and he winces. Then there is a pause. A pause wherein I wondered what excuse he’d use to end the silence—how he’d force her to see that she, too, had been wrong, how he’d justify his behavior, how he’d escalate the fight.
Yet Randall does none of those things. Instead he admits, simply, “I said it to hurt you.”
With that frank statement, that naked honesty, that quiet disclosure, Randall and Beth begin to forge a new path forward together.
I’ve spent the past year undertaking a family experiment with spiritual practices. Prayer and fasting, service and celebration, stillness and gratitude. It landed in my most recent book—Almost Holy Mama—in a story rife with vulnerability and humor that ended up being much less about what I did and much more about the infinite, abundant, overflowing grace of God.
Yet I’ve never practiced the spiritual discipline of confession. Even during a year when I regularly went to the depths in my prayer life, confession felt a bit like a bridge too far. Sure, God and I talked about my (plentiful) sins aplenty, but to share them with someone else? That seemed unwise. Uncomfortable. Maybe even unhinged.
Most of us learn from a young age to plate our hearts with armor. Self-justification becomes second nature. Confession is largely a foreign concept to many of us—even within the church.
Yet Scripture not only encourages it but instructs us to practice it. “Confess your sins to one another,” writes James. Why? “So that you may be healed” (James 5:16 NRSV).
That sounded pretty important to me—a command, not a suggestion. I took a deep breath and plotted my course.
Choosing to start with my husband, Daryl, made sense, both because he lives alongside me closely enough to witness and suffer from my sins more than anyone else, and because I knew that he was stuck with me, no matter what I confessed.
“And really,” I told myself, “my sins are small. I haven’t knocked over a 7-Eleven or anything. There is no murder most foul that’s been committed at my hands. Daryl is my one and only love.”
Yet sometimes it’s the smaller sins that are harder to confess, harder to forgive, harder to love a person through in all the years of a marriage and a lot of cumulative exhaustion.
One of my favorite poets, David Wright, encourages self-disclosure early and often, particularly in romantic relationships. In his poem, “Making Confession,” he writes:
“Confess several sins right off, first date:
your selfishness your love of candy
the child you fathered in high school
your worthless collecting of old magazines
how much you hate your mother’s cooking
how much you love your mother
Later, see what tolerance she has for real depravity…[1]”
Daryl and I have lived twelve years as husband and wife. We both came to faith young and have spent our lives in the church. We are both pastors, for goodness’ sake, yet I wasn’t sure where to begin baring the deceitfulness that infects my own soul to the person—besides Jesus—who loves me best.
Yet as we sat by the fire in our backyard late one spring night and began to hash out a simmering conflict, I knew the time was at hand. Daryl shared ways he’d felt hurt, alone, frustrated. I listened. Then it was my turn to speak.
I wanted to defend myself, to justify myself, to make it known that I had been wronged, too (which I had) and that sometimes I felt alone, hurt, and frustrated, too (which I did).
Instead I said, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” And then I laid it out there. “I said it to hurt you.”
And that made all the difference.
[1] David Wright, Lines from the Provinces, Great Unpublished, 2002. (ISBN 1-58898-058-8)
is a mom of three, speaker, and author of Uncluttered: Free Your Space, Free Your Schedule, Free Your Soul and serves as a Presbyterian pastor in southern California, alongside her husband, Daryl. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, or at www.courtneybellis.com.
Photograph © Ian Kiragu, used with permission
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