Confusion

Your relationship can handle way more honesty than you think it can. In fact, a new study from the University of Rochester found that being brutally honest with your partner benefits both of you.

Most people fear that difficult conversations will damage their relationships, so we avoid tough topics or sugarcoat our feelings. But research shows we’re wrong about the risks of being direct.

Scientists studied 214 couples, together an average of 15 years, and asked them to discuss something they wanted their partner to change. This is a conversation most people dread. Before talking, each person privately wrote down what they wanted to say, then had the conversation while researchers recorded what was actually shared.

The results? When people were more honest about their requests, both partners reported better emotional well-being and higher relationship satisfaction. What mattered more was that people actually were honest and that their partners perceived them as honest.

Three months later, many benefits persisted. People who had been more honest during the initial discussion reported better emotional well-being and were more likely to see positive changes in their partners over time.

You don’t need perfect communication skills or complete agreement about what happened for honesty to help your relationship. You just need willingness to share authentic thoughts and feelings.

Rather than tiptoeing around sensitive topics, couples should lean into honest communication. The truth can set your relationship free, even when it’s hard to hear.

Yuta Sakamoto was exhausted from selling home-improvement projects, including the boss’s demand that he help clean up at renovation sites on weekends. One day, he mustered his courage and announced he wanted to quit. But his boss warned him he would be ruining his future, and Sakamoto shrank back.

Then a friend proposed a solution. Sakamoto didn’t have to confront the boss again—he could hire someone to do it for him. After sending $200 and his case details to a quitting agency, he was finally a free man.

“I would have been mentally broken if I had continued,” says 24-year-old Sakamoto, who found a new job as a salesman at a printing firm.

A labor shortage in Japan means underpaid or overworked employees have other options nowadays. The problem: this famously polite country has a lot of people who hate confrontation. Some worry they’ll cause a disruption by leaving, or they dread the idea of co-workers gossiping about what just transpired in the boss’s office.

Enter a company called Exit. Toshiyuki Niino co-founded it to help people quit after experiencing his own difficulties in leaving jobs. “Americans may be surprised, but I was too shy or too scared to say what I think,” says Niino, 34. “Japanese are not educated to debate and express opinions.” Exit now handles more than 10,000 cases a year in which its staff quits on behalf of clients.

Possible Preaching Angles:

There are several approaches you might take with this story: 1) Fear and Courage – Learning how to overcome fear with faith and courage (2 Tim. 1:7); 2) Work Ethic – Finding a career that fits with our skills and well-being (Col. 3:23); Wisdom and Guidance – Sakamoto’s friend suggesting the use of a quitting agency illustrates seeking counsel from others when making decisions (Prov. 11:14).

In a 2022 behavioral study, researchers explored the connection between anger and moral courage. While participants were supposedly waiting for the study to start, they overheard two experimenters plan, and then execute, the embezzlement of money from the project fund. (The embezzlement was staged.) The participants had various opportunities to intervene, including directly confronting the experimenters, involving a fellow participant, or reporting to a superior.

Depending on your perspective of the events of the last few years, you may or may not be surprised to learn that only 27% of participants intervened. (Other experiments confirm the natural human inclination towards passivity). Interestingly, researchers found that the more an individual reported feeling angry, the more likely they were to intervene, showing that anger can serve as an important catalyst for moral courage.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Often the anger of man does not achieve God’s purposes, but there is a place for “righteous anger” at what is wrong and evil.

In his newsletter, blogger Aaron Renn reflects on the crucial role of mentors:

One of the core functions of mentors is to [tell you the things] people are already thinking and saying about you behind your back - and helping you overcome them. A Financial Times profile of American Express CEO Steve Squeri shows how a mentor did this for him.

Squeri is the grandson of Italian and Irish immigrants and the son of an accountant who worked nights and weekends at Bloomingdale’s department store to make ends meet. During his studies at Manhattan College, Squeri lived at home. He had never been on an aircraft until he joined a training program at what is now the consulting group Accenture.

Four years later he moved to Amex. There, his Queens accent and cheap suits stuck out so badly that an executive took him aside. He said, “You have a really sharp mind, but the rest of you needs a lot of work. [Senior managers] tend to use all the letters of the alphabet when they talk.”

The mentor took Squeri shopping, arranged for [speaking] lessons and even organized sessions with a cultural anthropologist so the younger manager would feel comfortable when he was sent to the group’s overseas offices. Squeri says, “I’m an example of how anybody can get to the top with a lot of hard work and having people that run the company that … are looking at individuals broadly and not judging books by their cover.”

Renn comments: “This mentor saw a diamond in the rough guy and made it his business to polish him up. This sort of thing is worth its weight in gold. [But notice how] good mentorship gets uncomfortable.”

Ride sharing apps (like Uber and Lyft) ratings have become almost meaningless. A recent report says, “Confusion over what constitutes 5-star behavior for certain services, combined with the guilt of potentially hurting someone’s livelihood, has people defaulting to perfect scores. Ratings padding is particularly rampant for services involving personal interactions. Everyone is ‘above average’ on some apps—way, way above.”

A customer named Mike Johnson has endured some awkward Uber rides. He once held his nose throughout a trip because the driver was carrying chopped-up Durian—the world’s smelliest fruit. Another time, he was stuck in the back seat while a driver bickered with her boyfriend. Yet another driver tried to sell him a Ponzi scheme. He rated each one five out of five stars.

Johnson explained: “They all seemed like nice people. I didn’t want them to be kicked off the app over my bad rating,” the 33-year-old New Yorker said. “Isn’t 5 stars, like, the norm?”

Ratings are so inflated that Lyft drivers whose scores dip below 4.8 out of 5 stars are asked to boost their performance. Drivers under 4.6 risk getting deactivated.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) God is not afraid to tell us the truth about our sin. 2) Christians should resist this rating inflation and be willing to speak the truth in love to one another.

After doing an analysis of seven high-profile cases where people died as a result of use of force by police, Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Justine McDaniel found a disturbing pattern. They say they found that police consistently gave initial statements that were “misleading, incomplete or wrong, with the first accounts consistently in conflict with the full set of facts once they finally emerged.”

Philip Stinson teaches criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, and says trends like these are not merely coincidental. He said, “The police own the narrative in every interaction they have with the public, because they write up the reports. Sometimes the reports are written to justify the actions the officers have taken, and sometimes to cover up what actually happened.”

In their analysis, Parker and McDaniel found that police accounts “regularly described the victims in terms assuming they were guilty of a crime; and the initial police version frequently used clinical language that seemed to obscure their own role in the incidents.”

According to Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, police often achieve this by employing deliberate use of the passive voice. She said, “When we use passive language in our own lives, usually we’re trying to create some distance from what happened, [as in] it’s ‘the milk fell’ instead of ‘I spilled the milk.’”

According to Stinson, restoring trust with the public will require greater accountability by police departments. “It’s very damaging to the police department because it does damage to their reputation when they put out these press releases and it turns out they’re false.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Effective leadership requires integrity and truth telling; when those in authority lie, obscure, or exaggerate the truth to protect themselves, they erode their credibility and trustworthiness.

It’s ironic that Grace Community Church, pastored by John MacArthur, is located in Sun Valley, California, because its leadership seems committed to keeping certain details hidden from light.

Christianity Today published a story in February about the struggles Hohn Cho had with getting people in his church to admit fault and correct an injustice. Cho is an attorney, and had been an elder at GCC. A year ago, he and several other elders were tasked with investigating claims of spousal abuse from a woman in the church’s care. What he discovered was that she’d been rebuked by elders for failing to reconcile with her husband, but later the husband was imprisoned for child molestation and abuse, vindicating her claims.

Cho says he repeatedly asked church officials to privately apologize and make things right, but they refused. He says Pastor John MacArthur himself told him to “forget it,” and Cho was eventually pressured into resigning from the board. Even after his resignation, Cho was contacted by numerous other women from GCC who’d been given similar counsel to endure abuse from their husbands. Ultimately, he concluded that he just could not forget it.

Cho wrote in a report to the elder board, “I genuinely believe it would be wrong to do nothing. At the end of the day, I know what I know. I cannot ‘un-know’ it, and I am in fact accountable before God for this knowledge.”

Cho told reporters at CT:

They sided with a child abuser, who turned out to be a child molester, over a mother desperately trying to protect her three innocent young children. And that was and is flatly wrong, and needs to be made right. Numerous elders have admitted in various private conversations that “mistakes were made” and that they would make a different decision today knowing what they know now. But those admissions mean you need to make it right with the person you wronged; that is utterly basic Christianity.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Abuse; Church Discipline; Failure, Spiritual - We can't claim to stand for the truth if we won't tell the truth when it's inconvenient to do so.

Federal law enforcement officers were dispatched to the Gold Coast Airport in Queensland, Australia after a drunk, disorderly woman refused to follow the crew’s instructions. Jetstar Airlines explained the situation in a brief statement afterward. “The safety of our customers and crew is our number one priority and we have zero tolerance for disruptive behavior.”

The woman, who one TikTok user referred to as a “drunk Karen,” clearly wore out her welcome among the nearby passengers who had to endure her belligerent behavior. On the posted TikTok video, police can be seen entering the plane and forcibly removing her from the aircraft, while onlookers began chanting the chorus to a 1969 hit from the band Steam. “Na na nahhh na, na na nahh na, hey hey hey … goodbye.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the words of the ancient African American proverb: “God don't like ugly.” While we're not to seek vengeance because it belongs to God, it's natural to be relieved when wrongdoers experience the consequences of their actions.

Edward Matthews had a problem with some of his neighbors, and it seemed based on his language and demeanor that he didn’t like their race. At least that’s how it appeared when a video of a confrontation went viral between Matthews, a middle-aged white man, and several younger Black men. Unfortunately, Matthews’ inability to keep his temper got the best of him when he blurted out his home address during the filmed confrontation, taunting his neighbors to “come [bleep]ing see me.”

In a way, Matthews got what he asked for. Before police eventually charged him with bias intimidation and harassment, hundreds of people gathered outside his residence to demand his arrest. As police led him from the house into a cruiser, Matthews was pelted by the crowd with water bottles and other foreign objects. Neighbors said that this behavior was common with Matthews and that they had been pleading for police intervention for months.

Kyle Gardner, a spokesman for the local police department, deplored Matthews’ behavior. “Nobody is as upset about this as we are. This is not what we want in our town.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

There are consequences for the words and ideas that we put out into the world. Our words have the power to uplift or tear down; we must use that power wisely.

Rumors have been circulating that Mathew McConaughey might be considering a run for governor of Texas in 2022, and perhaps a higher office after that. In a recent interview in Men's Journal, Jesse Will cornered the Hollywood star on the topic. McConaughey, resisted confirming or denying his thoughts on the matter. But when pressed to give a hypothetical campaign slogan, he shared that his favorite suggestion has been, "Make America All Right, All Right, All Right, Again." Then he paused and said, "But for me . ..It’s ‘Meet Me in the Middle—I Dare You.'" He then explained:

When facing any crisis, I’ve found that a good plan is to first recognize the problem, then stabilize the situation, organize the response, then respond. You can’t have unity without confrontation. And to have confrontation, you have to at least validate the other’s position. We don’t even do that. So, I’d say, I’ll meet you in the middle. I dare you. It’s a challenge, a radical move. You come this way, I’ll come your way. That’s how democracy works.

In other words, to explain to another human why they are wrong (if in fact it is them and not us in error), we must listen to them. We must understand where they are coming from? Why do they make the choices they do? You must meet them in the middle.

Atheist Angel Eduardo argues that keeping our beliefs to ourselves, while avoiding confrontation and promoting harmony, is actually harmful and immoral. Beliefs are the “engines of our actions. They’re foundational to how we think and behave, and they have consequences.” He admits when atheists tell Christians and people of other religions to keep their beliefs to themselves, they don’t truly grasp what they are asking:

We rarely think about this from the perspective of the believer. For them, every encounter is of paramount importance. They are truly convinced that you are in danger and that they possess the keys to salvation. ... Their proselytizing is a moral act, even when we consider it a nuisance. However misguided or wrong they might be, their actions are motivated by a desire to make our lives (and afterlives) better. ... It’s hard to imagine how the consciences of the ethically devout are burdened by every skeptic they’ve failed to convert. ... How much worse would that guilt be if they’d instead been unwilling to try?

Eduardo wants atheists and skeptics to be more understanding:

Imagine us atheists indifferently watching the religious waste their lives believing nonsense. What would it say about us if we didn’t try to talk them out of it, to help them save what little time they have left on this mortal coil, because we’ve chosen to keep our beliefs—or unbelief—to ourselves? Sure, we’re being polite in the moment. We’re exercising tolerance, in our own myopic way. We are living and letting live, but at what cost? Not one I’m willing to pay.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This fresh perspective should give Christians even more motivation for sharing our faith.

When someone stands up for his/her beliefs in the face of adversity, they are called a “moral rebel.” A prominent example is the case of the sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. He seemed too big to fall until actors Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan courageously came forward, risking their careers if unsuccessful. Moral rebels also confront a bully or correct a friend who uses a racist slur.

Secular psychologists say moral rebels have high self-esteem and are confident of their own “judgment, values and ability and thus that they have a social responsibility to share those beliefs.” The Christian outlook says “Exactly!”

The moral rebel isn’t afraid of occasional embarrassment or a lack of social harmony. They are far less concerned about conforming to the crowd. So, when they have to choose between fitting in and doing the right thing, they will probably choose to do what they see as right. The Christian outlook says “Exactly!”

A moral rebel needs to have grown up seeing moral courage in action, from parents but also peers and community leaders. He or she also needs to feel genuine empathy. Spending time with and really getting to know people from different backgrounds helps. White high school students who had more contact with people from different ethnic groups have higher levels of empathy and see people from different minority groups in more positive ways.

Those who have experienced the pain of rejection are less likely to be moral rebels. They need to fit in. For the Christian a close relationship with God and good fellowship mitigates against this.

A homeless man facing criminal charges was given a chance at redemption by looking at life through the perspective of the person he targeted. Harold Eugene Denson III faced two criminal charges for his role in an incident with a Ukrainian immigrant. Denson approached the immigrant, spat in his face, threatened him with a knife, and told him to go back to his own country.

Consequently, he was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and second-degree assault, which is classified as a hate crime under Oregon law. However, by pleading no-contest to both charges, the judge was willing to remove the bias charge if Denson could submit a 500-word essay that focuses on the experiences of Eastern European immigrants.

Multnomah County Judge Christopher Ramras said, “What I am asking you to do is put yourself into their shoes.” Deputy District Attorney Nicole Hermann said she hopes the report helps Denson “better understand many of the struggles and the difficulties that people who come from other countries go through when they move to this country and have lived side by side with people who are sometimes not as friendly or kind as they can be.”

Denson was grateful for the judge’s offer. “I appreciate the opportunity to write a report ... rather than stacking up a charge on my record,”

Potential Preaching Angles: Empathy is not only seeing through someone else’s perspective, but doing so because God loves them just as much as us. We live the mission of Jesus when we can encourage and promote peace through the practice of empathy.

Two defendants who appeared in Judge Greg Pinksi’s Montana Cascade County District court received unique punishments as part of the sentencing phase of their trial. Their punishments involved wearing signs.

Ryan Patrick Morris and Troy Allen Nelson were in violation of their respective probations related to previous criminal offenses. They both lied to the court about having served in the military as a way of receiving lenient sentences for their previous criminal behavior.

Judge Pinksi sentenced Morris to ten years for felony burglary, and Nelson five years for felony criminal possession of dangerous drugs, both with years suspended. Morris and Nelson will be required to write letters of apology to various veterans’ groups as well as complete 441 hours of community service. This is one hour for each citizen of Montana killed in combat since the Korean war. Then, during the years of their suspended sentence, they’ll be required to spend each Memorial Day and Veterans day visiting the Montana Veterans Memorial. They are required to wear a placard that reads, “I am a liar, I am not a veteran. I stole valor. I have dishonored all veterans.”

Judge Pinski said, “I want to make sure that my message is received loud and clear by these two defendants. You've been nothing but disrespectful in your conduct. You certainly have not respected the Army. You've not respected the veterans. You've not respected the court. And you haven't respected yourselves."

Potential preaching angles: Lying places you into a trap. When you try to lie your way out of that trap, it only makes it bigger and stronger. The only way to be free is to tell the truth.

In their book, The Way Back, Phil Cooke and Jonathan Bock ask significant questions:

Why did the Early Church succeed where we are failing? How did they transform the Western world in such a relatively short time? They did it because they did things that baffled the Romans. The Early Church didn't picket, they didn't boycott, and they didn't gripe about what was going on in their culture. They just did things that astonished the Romans. They took in their abandoned babies. They helped their sick and wounded. They restored dignity to the slaves. They were willing to die for what they believed. After a while, their actions so softened the hearts of the Romans that they wanted to know more about who these Christians were and who was the God they represented.

Without confrontation, protest, or debate, love did its work.

Pastor Scott Sauls spent five years working with Pastor Tim Keller at New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Sauls writes that there are many ways that he saw Keller model the gospel, but there is one thing that really stood out for him. Sauls writes:

Tim could receive criticism, even criticism that was unfair, and it wouldn’t wreck him. In his words and example, he taught me that getting defensive when criticized rarely, if ever, leads to healthy outcomes.

He also taught me that our critics, including the ones who understand us the least, can be God’s instruments to teach and humble us: First, you should look to see if there is a kernel of truth in even the most exaggerated and unfair broadsides. . . . So even if the censure is partly or even largely mistaken, look for what you may indeed have done wrong.

Maybe the critic is partly right for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, identify your own shortcomings, repent in your own heart before the Lord for what you can, and let that humble you. It will then be possible to learn from the criticism and stay gracious to the critic even if you have to disagree with what he or she has said.

If the criticism comes from someone who doesn’t know you at all (and often this is the case on the Internet) it is possible that the criticism is completely unwarranted and profoundly mistaken. When that happens it is even easier to fall into smugness and perhaps be tempted to laugh at how mistaken your critics are. Don’t do it. Even if there is not the slightest kernel of truth in what the critic says, you should not mock them in your thoughts. First, remind yourself of examples of your own mistakes, foolishness, and cluelessness in the past, times in which you really got something wrong. Second, pray for the critic, that he or she grows in grace.

Pat Payaso is currently running for an open seat on Boston's city council—and he recently got an idea for a creative way to campaign.

"Payaso" translates to "clown" in Spanish; according to a report in TIME, Payaso "donned a rainbow wig, a red nose, and clown makeup in recent campaign photos and videos on social media."

But then he actually showed up at a polling place with the clown costume, and people were a little scared: "Police tell The Boston Herald that Pat Payaso's presence near a polling location at Roxbury Community College made some people nervous … and they called the authorities."

Later, an officer stopped Payaso and "realized he wasn't a threat."

Potential Preaching Angles: Payaso wasn't trying to terrify anyone (at least, we hope not)—he just wanted to spread the word about his campaign and garner some interest from potential voters. But the way he did it ended up being far from fun. Now think about the ways you try to share the gospel and the good news about your faith: Are you making friends, family, or coworkers feel comfortable and safe as you tell them why you believe what you believe? Or might they feel confused or judged?