“May 11
“I think as a group and as a church we are doing pretty well at having ‘real community.’ For my part, I need to work harder on being honest – I only like to dig so deep into myself, sharing everything is too much to ask. I also need to be humble in the area of admitting that I could easily slip into the gossip trap and, therefore, I need to be extra careful about respecting confidentiality.”
Dearest Rachel –
I’d argue that everyone has secrets that they don’t share with anyone else, so I don’t know that I would fault you for not telling everything about yourself to everyone. I’m sure that’s not quite what you meant, but I’d say that nobody but God Himself needs to know the Whole Truth about you. Especially those faults that you may have, but you’re working on correcting.
And as far as gossiping goes, I know you shared a few things with me that I probably shouldn’t have known, which might suggest you did something similar with other friends. For myself, I’d probably think in terms of Oscar Wilde’s old line about how ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ But maybe I’m the exception to the rule; not everybody wants to be talked about.
I don’t know if you ever got this under control; the few stories you told me didn’t seem all that significant, but this was probably something I wasn’t as exposed to as certain other people. So I should probably reserve judgment on this aspect of your life to those other people, assuming they even know who they are.
Letters to Rachel 