I’m currently reading a book called “Smarter, Faster, Better” that is about how people get to be . . . well, those things – smarter, faster, and better. So far it’s interesting. If there is one predominant theme throughout the book, it is that if you want people to be smarter, faster, and better at things – you have to give them the ability to think. 
All sorts of things get in the way of our being able to think – and most of these have to do with feeling that we are threatened. We don’t think when we’re afraid that doing something different will threaten us. We don’t think when we feel that slowing down in the interim will slow us down over all. We don’t think when we feel guilty.
Recently I confessed my sins to a brother pastor. This is something that we do about every two weeks. Every time, there is a threatening feeling. Even though I have confessed my sins to this guy time after time, every time that I confess again, there is a small divisive voice inside of my head that whispers “are you sure you want to do this? are you sure you want him to know that about you?”
It’s the same way with confessing our sins directly to God, except for the fact that I can actually hide my sins from my brother pastor – God already knows about them before I even open my mouth. Yet and still, even with Him, there is a reluctance. Since I know that this reluctance doesn’t come from His knowing or not knowing – it has to be coming from something else. It has to be coming from my own reluctance to confess (literally meaning “to tell the truth”) my own sin.
But when I do, something magical happens. I remember reading a book just before Cricket was born about how to foster a child’s intellectual development. The book basically said the best way to kindle this was to teach them to label their own emotions – essentially to confess them.
And we have a God who will listen to us tell the truth about ourselves. We have a God who will listen to us say “I have screwed up, I don’t like where I am right now.” We have a God who will not threaten us, but will give us the freedom to take a new perspective on life, to think through our problems once again, and give it another shot. We have a God who enables us to be smarter, faster, and better through His forgiveness. May we always remember that.