something to ponder...

... from a book I have been reading in a haphazard fashion. I take it with me to work, and the only time I make any progress, read a few pages, is on days when I am at work all day - long enough to be scheduled for a lunch break. I can eat my lunch in about ten minutes, but required to take an hour off the clock. So I am always looking for something to read for the next forty five minutes. Occasionally, desperately sneaking a magazine off the rack to read something that caught my attention on the cover.

But usually occupying my time with something interesting that I have been reading at home. Most likely a library book. This one is was 'borrowed' from a bookshelf I passed by and noticed the authors' name on the spine, by someone I had a read before. My knowledge of this man is that he was a reference in a sermon I heard years ago, so intriguing was the idea that I knew I needed to read the book: 'Blue Like Jazz'.  A chapter taken from this book, written by Don Miller.

Miller was attending a college in the northwest, Oregon or Washington. Involved with a group that wanted to sponsor a booth at a campus event, something like a carnival or recruitment fair. They decided their booth would be a Confessional. But instead of offering to hear the darkest secrets of passers-by, then would invite students into the tent to listen. To hear the confessions of the sponsors, the students who were manning the booth. Allowing the members of the group to open up their hearts, become transparently truthful and share their own personal fallibility, quirks of human-ness. Confessing their innermost shipwrecks to total strangers who wander in.

Would that be easier to do, share horrendous heartaches, or horrible wrong-doing with your close friends, dearest relatives or complete strangers? Is it less painful to do with someone you feel would love you regardless of mis-steps/stupidity, or someone you are paying by the hour to help turn you into a better person? Are we more likely to be completely honest with well-educated, professional, experienced psycho-babble experts or open our psyche to the ones we think will love us without regard to the gritty, muddy, foul-smelling excrement that occurs as a result of poor choices we make every day?