05 “Faking Good” (The Well Traveled Road)

Last updated on February 4, 2024

Do we all tend to hide our faults and exaggerate our strengths in our own minds? And, when we write about ourselves do we put a halo over our self-portraits like artists did over the “saints” in Medieval paintings? Photoshopping the selfie of your life, airbrushing over the ugliness and using a fuzzy filter on the lens may be the only way our ego can really let itself be recorded. Perhaps, but we don’t have to go that over-traveled way.

When I was a teenager I went to a youth group that had a poster on the wall of a Raggedy Ann doll being squeezed through the rollers of an old hand cranked washer-wringer tub, the precursor to an electric washing machine. At the top of the poster it said, “The truth shall set you free,” and across the bottom it said, “but first it will make you miserable.” The truth about ourselves may really bother us, like aching eyes when we come out of the darkness and into the light.*

That poster began a long, uneven journey for me that has been sometimes one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes I have fallen down, only to get back up again. In the Good Book it says, “Confess your faults to one another that you may find healing and restoration” (James 5:16), and I have found that candid discussion with another gracious person on the journey to self honest can be very helpful (especially if they are a humble and gracious person who knows they too have the same struggle).

It is possible to begin a journey toward self-honesty, but you can’t get there overnight. Over a lifetime—after you have walked a thousand miles down the road toward humble self-awareness—you may despair that there is so far left to travel. I sometimes feel that way.

When you first begin your journey, you’re not sure of who you are and, if you are anything like me, you are unconsciously unaware, not knowing what you do not know about yourself. After a long while, you may only arrive at consciously unaware, honestly admitting that you learn that you fake good to yourself a little too much, and you put on a face for others to see more often than you ever knew. Today, though I’ll take another bite of humble pie.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” — Jesus.

(*This quote may attributable to President James Garfield).