i have to be honest with you. I feel like I scream about honesty and transparency and the importance of being "real", but my voice is muffled and hard to make out because I'm screaming through a mask. There are some things that I want the entire world to know about me:

Just because I don't look you in the eye when I talk to you, doesn't mean I'm lying. Eye contact only comes easy to me with a select few people in my life. Sometimes I smoke cigars. Peach cigars, to be exact. I don't think there is anything wrong with drinking alcohol. I don't drink it often because I haven't tasted any that I really like. Sometimes, like today at work when i slammed my head into a coat rack, i cuss. I dropped the F-bomb in a room full of 2 year olds. Last year I kissed guys just to kiss them. I think that it is just as wrong to have sex with your boyfriend before you're married, as it is to be homosexual. I've decided that I won't judge one more harshly than the other. I've decided that I don't want to judge either. I am selfish and easily angered. I use words to try and make myself look better than you. Initially, I decide whether or not I want to get to know you based on the way you look and dress. Last semester I got drunk. Ridiculously, embarrassingly, regretably drunk. Everytime I get up to sing or play music at church, a war between my pride and the knowledge of how precious music is to God is waged in my head.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in change and sanctification. I believe in holiness. i believe in all of those things, but i also believe in grace and being honest about how you feel and where you're at. I believe that story about Jesus and the woman who was caught in bed with a man who wasn't her husband. I believe that humans are sick. We are infected by sin. I believe that we are taught to believe that sin is an act, so we stop doing the act, but the disease (which isn't an act at all) continues to spread. maybe we should stop focusing on what we're 'doing that we shouldn't be doing' or 'not doing that we should be doing' and just take a long look at what we are compared to what we were created to be. we were created in the image of God. we were created to act like God and to speak like God. we were created to love the human race just like God loves the human race. we aren't here to judge them. we are here to love them. and we can't love them if we have convinced ourselves that we are better than them just because we've stopped sinning outwardly.

Maybe it was unnecessary for me to broadcast all of that to the world. However, I seriously doubt that I would've done that had it not been necessary. I can't live my life in front of you half-way. What you just read is me. I'm defined by what I just wrote just as much as I'm defined by the good, 'toccopriate', christian culturally accepted aspects of who I am.

I'm not trying to be mean, but if you read this, and what you learned about me makes you doubt my relationship with Jesus, then I think we might be following two very different Jesus'.