The Moment of Truth

I guess its a little too easy to blog on something I just talked about on Sunday morning, but I needed a topic so here it is:

The show the Moment of Truth is an interesting way to make people lean into to their own ugliness. I like the show because it forces people to face truths about themselves and about their personal relationships. Its interesting that the motivator is money. I guess that's the irony of the show: they use people's greed to get them to expose other vices in their lives. Its like one vice is the motivator for other vices. Some contestants are smart and stop with only minimal damage done to their relationships, others however, take chances and walk away with no money and damaged relationships. If your going to risk important relationships, at least win some money!

The latest contestant I saw was a married woman with four children. She said "yes" when asked if there were any secrets in her life that would break up her marriage. Ouch. The husband didn't want to know the secret. I would want to know, because even if the truth hurts, the best thing we can do is lean into it. Its only by leaning into it the truth that the path of healing begins and real relationships develop. Their marriage now faces an undisclosed secret that is already a seed of discontent and if left alone will grow into a tree bearing divisive fruit.

We don't like to lean into ugly truth, but sometimes its the best thing we can do. Most of us don't have money to motivate us to lean into our own ugliness, so we have to find something else that will drive us. Often, a hidden ugliness will create problems for us and those problems become too hard to face alone and become our motivator. I think often our motivator for facing our own junk is the result of not facing the junk in the first place. For example, I've talked to people who are depressed because of something they have done that they know is counter to living a life opposed to God's truth. So they get tired of being depressed and confess their damaging behavior to someone they trust in order to get free from it.

I don't think its necessarily a bad thing to be motivated by the results of a vice in order to face a vice. There's this idea in the Bible about good fruits and bad fruits. If the results of bad fruits in our lives (the results of our vices) lead us to pursuing good fruits in our lives (joy, peace, kindness) then hopefully we will eventually be smart enough to give up the bad fruits altogther so that we can live the kind of life we all want...a life full of hope, joy, peace, beauty, forgiveness and grace.