Have I Become Your Enemy by Telling You the Truth?

I was sitting in our home office bleeding all over myself. I had been deeply cut and was taking time to lick my wounds. A little while earlier, Tamarah said something to me straight and true. I didn’t like what she said and was having a hard time accepting it—partly due to her delivery—straight, and partly due to my suspicion that her point was on target—true. At that point in our marriage, I had not yet learned the depths to which committed love can go nor was I mature enough to know how to receive it as such. 

If that weren’t challenging enough, Tamarah eventually came to the door of the office and knocked on the frame. The office desk faces away from the door, so in the swivel chair I turned around to face her. As soon as our eyes met, she asked me, “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?” I hesitated. My initial thought, unuttered, was, “Yes, I know what I’m doing. I’m bleeding all over the place from that gunshot comment of yours thirty minutes ago.” Too afraid to say that, I sat there silently looking up at her. After an awkward moment, she said, “You’re pouting” and walked away. 

She said it matter-of-factly, not hatefully. And even though her second comment didn’t feel very good, either, it affected me differently. If I received her first comment like a .38 to the chest, her second comment felt more like a cauterizing knife—cutting and healing at the same time. I cannot fully explain why, other than I remember being prompted to ask myself, “Is there any truth whatsoever to what she just said?” 

Yes. Painfully, yes. To whatever degree, there was some truth to what Tamarah said to me. It didn’t feel good, but somebody needed to tell me even if I didn’t want to hear it. I was thirty-something years old with two children when she said that to me. I remember continuing to think to myself something like, “I’m a grown man and right now I feel like a third grader. Somehow, I don’t think that’s a compliment. I have work to do.” 

As an aside, if you have Leader traits, then I will kindly remind you that tone matters. In my experience working with natural leaders, they find discussions about tone to be tedious and sometimes ridiculous. True, today’s culture has trained people to be hypersensitive and too easily offended. At the same time, Christian Scripture acknowledges there’s wisdom in adjusting delivery and tone to the audience and context. 

For example, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver” (Proverbs 25:11, ESV). In this word picture, the apple is the message being communicated. If the message is true, then it’s gold. The setting is the context and the way in which the message is conveyed. If the message is communicated humbly and with grace, then it’s silver. But if the message is false, or the delivery is arrogant or graceless, then the word is not fit. Meaning, it doesn’t stand a chance of being accepted. 

A second example would be the Apostle Paul’s ability to nuance his delivery when he writes, “But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children” (1 Thess. 2:7, ESV). And then in the same paragraph, “You know how we were exhorting and encouraging and imploring each one of you as a father would his own children” (1 Thess. 2:11, NASB). The maturity of Paul—someone with Leader traits, bar none—to be both mother-like and father-like is a prime case study for what Proverbs 25:11 looks like in real time. 

Having said all that, my target in this post is people who are constituted like me—those with Helper traits who instinctively avoid conflict, those who are people-pleasers, those who are peacekeepers. We are nice people. And tender-hearted. We mean no harm. And therein lies a problem. 

People with Helper traits have a dark secret on the inside of that get-along exterior. The dark secret is that kind people like me have a bad habit of lying. Not so much what we might call bald-faced lying. Although that can happen. More often than not, people-pleasers tell what I refer to as passive lies. Passive lies are half-truths or truths not told at all. In certain contexts, we would struggle to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Even if God helped us. 

I suspect that the contexts in which people get compromised in truth-telling have to do with real or perceived need and risk. As in, if it’s the end of the day and I’m already tired, and I calculate that if I say what I’m thinking will lead to a thirty-minute tug-of-war, then no, I will not say it. It feels like I need some peace and quiet, so I will not take the risk of full truth-telling. 

There are, of course, legitimate reasons why a person may not tell the whole truth. Like the trapped victim of an active abuser. There are countless iterations of this, both domestic and vocational, which are for another post on another day. But I at least want to acknowledge that such situations do exist. 

For now, I’ve been thinking for the past several months about Paul’s question to the Galatians, “Have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (Galatians 4:16). I’m taking the verse out of context but I’m after the principle. I’m thinking about this because I don’t like having people not liking me for something I said. Except I now have people in my life who don’t like me for what I’ve said—sometimes for the truth I believed could not be ignored, and sometimes because I did not communicate the truth in a gracious way. 

My instinct before speaking is to pause, measure, edit, review, then maybe say it. Or maybe not. Sure, there can be some wisdom in not just blurting out words. But I know myself. And the driving force for not speaking the truth is fear. Fear of conflict. Fear of not being liked or respected. Fear of not being needed or wanted. Fear of not being loved. 

The Apostle John’s response to that is to say, “There is no fear in love. A growing understanding and valuing of God’s love for you will cast out your fear; otherwise, the one who is captive to fear is not really experiencing God’s love” (1 John 4:18, my translation). Another way to say it is, the more I know and experience God’s love for me in Jesus, the freer I am to repent of my fear of your response when I speak truth in love to you. I can now love you for your sake rather than loving you for my sake.

Here’s a funny thing: I just asked Tamarah if she can think of an example where I spoke truth to her in a way that she found either hurtful or challenging. We talked about it for a while, but she could not come up with a clear story. She said she knows I’ve called her out for things like interrupting me and others, and for things like tone and delivery. We’ve concluded that this is also a feature or trait of Leaders—take it, assimilate it, and move on. But for those like me with Helper traits, we can only wish it were that simple. 

Because God has said, “Stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body” (Ephesians 4:25, NLT).