One of the Biggest Dirty Little Secrets of My Life...

My Dirty Little Secret #1: My Sins

My Sin of Lying

For much of my life, I was a habitual liar. I think it started in eighth or ninth grade because I was a geek, and I started lying to make myself seem better to my peers. Then I started lying to get out of doing things I didn’t want to do. And then I started lying about just about everything because lying had become so much a part of who I thought I was.

In college, after my dad died, someone around campus was stealing stuff. So I made up this wild story about how someone had stolen my chemistry book, and that they sent me an anonymous message that my book was in a dumpster in the back of a store. So I went to dig it out! I made up the story to get the attention and admiration of my favorite teachers.

In graduate school at Vanderbilt University, I was a Sunday school teacher. One Sunday, I had not prepared my lesson. But instead of admitting that, I made up a wild story about how someone broke into my apartment right before I left for Sunday school and held me hostage! But I said my Bible was open on the dining room table, and I told the police that’s probably why the intruder left without harming me. I could tell the police were skeptical about my story. Do you know you can get into a lot of trouble filing a false police report?! That didn’t happen, but it could have!

My Sin of Prioritizing My Calling above God

Below is one of my favorite Bible passages, but not for reasons that I usually share. Here it is:

You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psalm 64:1-4)

Fifteen years ago, I was a discipleship and leadership pastor at a large, five-campus church in the Pittsburgh area. One day, this Bible passage came up in my devotional reading, and God showed me how I had been living this passage—by replacing every occurrence of God’s name with the phrase “success in ministry”:

You, success in ministry, are my god,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.

I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because success in ministry is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands. (My warping of Psalm 64:1-4)

My ministry, and my success in ministry, had replaced God as first priority in my life. The knowledge broke my heart. And sadly, that was true, on and off, for about five years.


My Sin of Pride and Jealousy

After the first five years in my role as a discipleship and leadership pastor, the role changed, my health started declining, and that "success in ministry" declined as well.

At the same time, some of my friends, a few of whom I had mentored to varying degrees, started experiencing increased "success in ministry.” Not understanding what was happening to them and to me, I responded first with shock, and then with fear that God was abandoning me and my calling for someone else, and then with envy and jealousy.

It’s difficult for me to talk about these long-persistent sins. You might feel uncomfortable right now too—perhaps for me, and if so, thank you—but also perhaps for yourself.

Many Christian counselors observe that many Christians struggle with at least one sin that persists for years or sometimes even decades. So whether your persistent sins are the same as or different than mine, you may indeed have them.


Two Main Classifications of Sin:

1. Sins of commission

This is when we do the wrong things.

Examples are lying, stealing, sexual sin, gossip, etc.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans 1:29-32)

2. Sins of omission

This is when we do not do the right things. It’s when you know what God wants you to do but you do not do it, and it can be very specific and personal to you.

For example, I sensed for years that God wanted me to get up early and do my work during business hours instead of my habitual evening hours. But I had a hard time consistently doing that.

Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:17)

But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. (James 1:22-25)

My Dirty Little Secret #2: My Failures

In childhood, and throughout high school and college, I dreamed of being a brilliant medical researcher. But after investing four years in a college chemistry degree and six years in a research lab in graduate school, I found scientific research to be tedious, restricting, and beyond my God-given abilities.

The kind of Dirty Little Secret of Failure that I’m talking about here is failure that is not because of my sin, but is nevertheless costly, embarrassing, and life-altering.

Life-altering failure comes in two varieties, identified by Nikki Martinez and listed below:

1.  Abject failure 

Abject failure results in losing something that feels essential. The cause can be of our own doing or not. Examples are loss of health, career, respect, or other essential values.

2.  Glorious failure

Glorious failure happens when you give something your all but you go down in a big blaze of glory.

The hardest kind of failure: 
My own experience, and my experience with coaching clients as they pursue their Christian callings, show that failure hardest when it is both abject and glorious—in other words, BOTH extremely important AND very public.

The Bible is full of people who failed.

Elijah made the rain stop for three years (1 Kings 17:1), witnessed God’s miraculous provision of food (1 Kings 17:14), and beat the prophets of the false god, Baal, by calling down fire from heaven (1 Kings 18:38). But when Elijah's victory so angered the king’s wife Jezebel that she pursued Elijah to kill him, this high-profile prophet of God ran like a scaredy-cat out of Dodge, plopping down in dejected misery in the middle of the forsaken wilderness, and whined to God that he was the only one left that still worshipped God (1 Kings 19).

My Dirty Little Secret #3: Hurt by Other People

When I started my glorious new career as a pastor, I was 45 years old. I’d dreamed about something like that for decades but never thought it could actually happen. And honestly, when it did happen, I felt woefully unprepared. I grew up in a church tradition that limited women's roles in leadership, and while I respect that view, I later discovered that my male and female peers had decades of experience and learning about leadership that I lacked. I also experienced brief but severe gender discrimination in a short-term job.

Because of gender discrimination, I had slowly, over decades, started dressing and acting like the successful people that I wanted to be like. And they were mostly males. So I wore loose-fitting jeans and polo shirts, and I carried myself in more traditionally male ways, to the extent that, unbeknownst to me, some people erroneously concluded I was gay.

I was messed up because of the way I RESPONDED to other people hurting me.

Unfortunately, the list of ways that other people can hurt us throughout a lifetime is almost endless. Here are some examples:

• Rape or molestation
• Physical or emotional abuse
• Never or rarely feeling loved, approved, or accepted at home
• Alcoholism, drug abuse, neglect or other dysfunction in the family-of-origin

These kinds of hurts result from the sinful world in which we live.

“From the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander.” (Matthew 5:19)

Ugh. This was not a fun blog to write!

This blog probably wasn't fun for you to read either! 🙂

But it’s important to face our Dirty Little Secrets. They prevent us from being who God has created us to be and from doing what God has created us to do.

Parts 2 and 3 of this blog series, "Dirty Little Secrets," will be the fun parts to read, full of God's Good News, from the Bible and from life experiences, about how God redeems our dirty little secrets for His glory, our good, and His Kingdom's gain. I can't wait to share that with you!

We all have these Dirty Little Secrets that we tend to ignore and hide:

• Dirty Little Secret #1: Our persistent sins
• Dirty Little Secret #2: Our life-altering failures
• Dirty Little Secret #3: The ways in which other people have hurt us in significant ways

This seems bleak! But just you wait! Good news and practical help, based on God’s amazing grace and transformation, is coming! I'll share that with you in the next two blogs.

Ask God to show you the Dirty Little Secrets that He wants to overcome in your life:

• Any persistent sin with which you have struggled most of your life
• Any life-altering failure of yours
• Any ways in which other people have hurt you in significant ways

Ask God to give you His peace, comfort, wisdom, healing, and victory about your Dirty Little Secrets.

Come back for Parts 2 and 3 of my blog series about Dirty Little Secrets!