“The truth about you is you don’t know the truth about you.”- John Ortberg
In Chapter 7 (“What Open Doors will Teach You”) of All the Places to Go, John Ortberg writes that all of us suffer from a kind of personal blind spot. The difficulty is that when someone has a problem, the last person to know is . . . the person who has the problem.
Not only do we have no knowledge of the truth about ourselves, we don’t even know what that truth about us is, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky observes in Notes from Underground:
“”Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”
The key to the offer of an open door is self-awareness. We need to be aware not only of what is going on outside but also what is going on inside us. Self-awareness is the polar opposite of self-preoccupation.
We have to accept the truth about ourselves in order to go through an open door, relying on God’s strength- not ours. In the rest of Chapter 7 John explores four ways going through open doors reveals as well as requires us to face the truth about ourselves.
Today’s question: What Bible verses have enabled you to face the truth about you? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Face the truth”
