You Don't Have to Pretend

I ran into a woman from a church I once served — she and her husband had been going through a very difficult time in their marriage, and they had quietly stopped coming to worship. She started explaining why, a little defensively, the way people do when they assume the pastor is keeping attendance.

Then she stopped and said simply: "You know, Joe — on Sunday mornings, I can't keep pretending that everything's okay when it's not okay."

That sentence has stayed with me for years.

How sad that she would feel she had to pretend in order to belong. And yet — how many of us have felt exactly that way? The sense that church is a place for people who have it together, and that our job is to appear as though we do.

Jesus was remarkably clear on this point. He didn't come for the people who had it all figured out. He came for the rest of us — the ones who know, if we're honest, that we are works in progress. He scooped children up into his arms precisely because they hadn't yet learned to pretend. What you see is what you get. They put themselves out there, fully and without reservation.

That kind of vulnerability is not weakness. It is the very thing that makes real relationship possible. When we have to perform — when we can't bring our actual selves to the table — we lose the honesty and openness that allow others to truly know us, and to be known in return.

The woman I met in the grocery store thought she had to choose between her real life and her church community. She was wrong — but I understood why she felt that way. And I wonder how many people around us are making that same painful calculation.

May the communities we belong to be places where no one has to pretend. Where the struggling are welcome, and the honest are at home.

Prayer: Gracious God, forgive us for the ways we have made it harder for people to bring their real selves — to church, to friendship, to you. Give us the courage to be honest about our own struggles, so that others might feel the freedom to be honest about theirs. Make us communities of grace — where no one has to pretend, and everyone belongs. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.

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