Free way

Last week I bought a new CRV. And since then, so apparently did every third person in Wake County. I now see them everywhere. If I lined up all the CRV's I now see on the roads, I could walk across the top of them all the way to East Liberty Ohio.

Have you noticed this phenomenon? Cars, shoes, coats, haircuts, favorite bands...once you partake, you awaken to the fact that you are part of a mass partaking. Something you didn't notice before becomes all you see.

There is power in confession. Not confession as in going and telling a trained stranger your secrets, but in having a community of people with whom you can share life and be honest. The power isn't that God suddenly loves you again for enduring the pain of humiliating disclosure. The power is in letting your inner world be known and having others not run in fear and judgment like you've be certain would happen since childhood. When we're honest with each other, we not only find there is love available for ourselves, but we also find that the assumed hierarchy of goodness and purity is an illusion. Everyone is struggling. Everyone is broken. Everyone is doing their best to grope through the dark. It's all just a matter of brand and scale.

Confession, or shall we just say, being honest with a trustworthy few, isn't just about revealing the skeletons in your closet. It's reminding ourselves that you're not the only wretch. And once you begin to realize that these things you carry for so long, having assumed you're uniquely terrible or unworthy, are only a slight variation on what everyone else is carrying, you will have peace. You'll no longer judge. You'll no longer condemn. You'll no longer compete because that contest can only be won by lying. You will simply be free to live, free to love every other person because you realize you and every other person were always driving different colors of the same car.