Honesty requires you to notice and respond to signals indicating the need for improvement. Your experiences provide evidence that shows how correct and complete your beliefs, desires, or actions are, exposing the need for improvement in one or more of these areas.1
As more of reality is revealed to you, and the more honest you become, the more you will notice limitations in the beliefs, actions, and feelings of yourself or others.2 You will notice problems you and others face that you did not notice before,3 and you will be more likely to find solutions to them than you were before. You will also notice potential improvements that you and others could make that you did not notice before, and better reasons for making them.
Pay attention to what bothers you in life. While some simply ignore what they don’t like, it is common to complain about undesirable situations. Much rarer than either approach is to actually search out a way to improve undesirable situations. Begin with those you find most unpleasant.
It is dishonest to fail to respond to signals from your life that indicate needed change.4 How do you react to what you do not like in your life? Do you fix it, or do you ignore it? Do you seek out new actions and reconsider alternatives you were previously aware of ?
When you live dishonestly, it becomes more difficult to notice and triangulate the signals that boost your confidence or indicate a need for improvement. Reality can’t teach you until you act as you really are. Creation is designed to reveal to you every single way that you could be better, but just as sunlight can only cure what is exposed to it, it can only do this to the extent that you honestly live as you really are.
Most people learn early that they can draw a curtain over the mirror of life experience by ignoring the evidence it provides. Change your beliefs, feelings, and actions whenever given sufficient reason to. Any denial of what you see will lead to greater difficulty in seeing anything else. The more evidence you ignore, the less of the mirror you see. You can’t ignore your faults without also losing sight of your strength and potential, leaving you less willing to recognize or live up to what you could be and do if you were more honest about yourself.
Be honest about what life reveals about your limitations. Honesty is to your character as cancer detection is to your body. It is your mechanism to sort out what benefits you from what harms you.5 When you are dishonest with yourself, you willingly give away the mechanism God has given you to lead you to the most joy and happiness by turning off your ability to see what harms you. The more dishonest someone is, and the longer they remain so, the less they notice what should be very obvious about themselves, others, and the world.
Footnotes
- 1. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have found your deeds unfinished in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; hold it fast, and repent. (Revelation 3:2-3, NIV) ↩
- 2. Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. (1 Corinthians 3:13-15) ↩
- 3. The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble. (Proverbs 4:19) ↩
- 4. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. (John 3:17-21) ↩
- 5. The body has sophisticated mechanisms to detect and kill cells that are harmful. It is not uncommon for cells to develop problems. When this happens under normal conditions, the body detects and destroys them before they can propagate. Cancer occurs when the body’s natural ability to detect aberrant cells is somehow curtailed, allowing the damaging cells to multiply in both number and effect. Cancer is caused by environmental and genetic factors. For example, when certain people smoke cigarettes, their bodies start creating lung cells with thicker-than-usual cell walls that make damaged cells invisible to the mechanisms that normally destroy them. When a damaged cell happens to develop, the body has lost the ability to see it, and therefore can’t fix it. ↩