Nice girls don’t say bad words.  Nice boys wear belts and undershirts.  Nice people come from nice families.  I grew up in a world that, though decidedly Christian in its beliefs—including the importance of embracing Jesus as personal savior for sin—also had a strong overlay of “nice.”  We were the typically southern & odd amalgamation of half sinful enough to merit hell and half incredibly nice.

But this sugar and spice and everything nice girl more than once found herself caught in strange, inexplicable moments of malaise.  I’d be riding in the car or sitting alone when a vague ill-at-ease feeling would come over me, some fuzzy feeling within.  Creeping in was the strange sensation that “something is off but I don’t know what.”

It was about 15 years ago that I finally began keeping something I fondly labeled “My Journal of Sin & Redemption.”  I would go to confess my sin at the end of the day, but as a “nice” girl, I just didn’t have a strong working vocabulary for my personal transgressions.  This presented a problem: no words, no confession.  No confession, no exhalation in the presence of God.  Just fuzziness.  So I actually had to review a printed list of sins to figure out which specific ones were mine.  I focused and prayed repeatedly:  help me see my sin.  And he did.

Over the years, seeing my sin has become (in light of Jesus’ work on the cross) one of the greatest of gifts.  When I began to accept that I wasn’t nice—not just in theory but in actuality—lights started popping on, illuminating entire new regions within, regions filled with all kinds of goodies like “pride,” “anger,” “selfishness,” “idolatry,” or “envy.”   I could now see and confess that I was, well, envious of Sally Jones’ perfect family, or angry that Henry Smith got kudos when I didn’t.

Eventually, I dropped the journal (I’d internalized enough categories to last for a while), and I added new words to my vocabularly, which were less about sin and more about sadness, disappointment, loneliness, or shame.  And amazingtly, over the years with the gift of the growing lexicon for reality (no matter how un-nice it is), I’ve found myself with fewer and fewer of those fuzzy, icky moments (or at least they last less long).  Likewise, I’ve found myself with a far greater appreciation of the God who not only loves me, but whom I know in my knower, really knows me.

             Sometimes, now, when I listen to my friends, especially those who are 15 or 20 years younger,  my hope is that God will graciously give them the gift of the “sin” words.  In a broader culture that has reduced sin to at best a few albeit legitimate “isms” around race, sex, and age, and possibly “bad stewardship,” the ability to honestly name who we are can shrink.  But oh how the lights come on, the landscape broadens and the colors deepen as we get the words and are freed up, in the presence of God and others, to tell the truth about ourselves.