Lance and Lying

Like most everyone else in the country, I’ve watched with fascination as Lance Armstrong’s moral decline has played out on television. How can someone spend so many years of his life lying so publicly and assume it’s OK and that he’ll never get caught?

One of my roommates at UCLA was a pathological liar. I didn’t know that term at the time, but it definitely describes her. She stole clothes from the store where she worked and blamed it on other people. She cheated prolifically on her schoolwork and lied about it. She lied to her parents every time she got on the phone with them. One time she lied about me. She ate some of our other roommate’s food, even when I warned her—begged her, actually—not to. I knew our roommate would get off work late and be starving, and that was the only food we had in our dorm. As usual, I went to bed two hours before everyone else, but I was awake when our roommate got home and searched for her missing food. When she asked the lying roommate, I heard, “Oh, maybe Leura ate your food. Yeah, I saw her eat it.” I sprung up out of bed and confronted her. She giggled it off, but I remember thinking this was like nothing I had ever seen before. She couldn’t seem to do anything but lie.

I have my own sad history of lying. It came naturally when I was a kid and especially a teenager. I embellished my stories to get attention. I told my parents I was going one place and went somewhere else. And then there was the time I hit a truck in the parking lot at a school dance. No one saw me and the damage was minimal, so I actually picked off the part of the guy’s truck that had attached itself to my parents’ car, drove a few miles outside of town and threw it in a field, and came home to tell my dad that someone had hit our car while I was inside the school. I got off scot free, but I lived in fear for a year of that guy tracking me down. It was a happy day for me when he finally graduated and I could walk the halls in peace again.

My lying didn’t end in high school, but by the time I moved in with the scary roommate, I had had a serious encounter with Jesus and my life was slowly changing. If not for the grace of God, today I might be a less decorated, less public Lance Armstrong. Still, I would call honesty the last and greatest frontier of the Holy Spirit’s work in me, and probably in most people. It takes discipline to always tell the truth. It’s so much easier to guestimate the number of hours I worked on a project than to track them, minute by minute. But that’s what honest requires. I’m swapping food journals with a friend, and it takes discipline to honestly write down every bite I take throughout the day and not “overlook” that bite of my daughter’s cookie.

It’s only in the past few years that I’ve been freed from feeling like I have to offer an excuse—sometimes a made-up or embellished excuse—to get out of something. I’ve learned to just say, “No,” with no lie to back it up. I feel the Holy Spirit’s conviction now when I tell a story and exaggerate something, “There were a million people there!” No, back up, it was more like a hundred. I’m more conscious of even the “sweet” lies we tell our children. When Camryn asks me if there’s a Santa Claus, I’m careful to say, “Well, what do you think?” rather than telling her a lie that surely the rest of the world would excuse me for.

Because here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. It doesn’t matter if my lie is not hurting someone else. It only matters what God thinks, and it matters deeply if He’s the one I hurt.

“Lying is extraordinarily common, and we couldn’t get along without it,” says David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor and author of the book Why We Lie. Speaking about lying in light of the Armstrong confession, Smith says, “[Lying] greases the wheels of society.”

Another professor wrote that nothing about what Lance Armstrong did is shocking. “We all lie every day,” says Robert Feldman. “We live in a culture where lying is quite acceptable.”

Except it’s not. It’s not acceptable to God, and I don’t think most people would say it’s acceptable to lie to them. It’s certainly not acceptable for my children to lie to me, which is why that brings the most severe punishment in our house. I want my kids to know—and I want myself to know—that telling the truth, always, even when it hurts, is one of the things that sets us apart as followers of Jesus. “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:9–10). God does not lie, and my new self, my redeemed self, follows His example. There’s simply no place for lying in the life of one who has been redeemed by Truth Himself. 

How Hard Have We Got It?

Flipping through the channels while on the treadmill last week, I heard a panel of both men and women say that this is the hardest time in history to be a woman. Skeptical but curious, I tuned in for another minute to see what evidence they would give. Nothing new or surprising came up. They mentioned how women are expected to keep bearing the load of home management and child rearing while working at least 40 hours a week.

While I would concede that we women may be operating at the fastest pace ever, I cringe at the word “hardest.” Does this panel of well-dressed, well-fed, well-paid American men and women ever read about history? Can we even begin to imagine what “hard” looked like for a woman in the ancient world? A woman who had no warm place to live, no hospital or medicine, no lifespan beyond a couple of grueling decades? What about all those women who gave birth in fields, only to watch baby after baby die? Generations and generations of women lived their lives knowing—and fearing—that men viewed them as little more than objects to be used and assaulted. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also had to sew and wash their clothes by hand.  

In more recent history, I think of the slave women who watched their husbands and children sold on an auction block. Or even the pioneer women, who traveled for months by foot or horseback, enduring violent storms, illnesses, and attacks by natives, only to end up in a freezing cold shack miles away from the nearest neighbor, cooking three meals a day out of whatever they could grow. What about the women who starved themselves so they could parcel out their few morsels of food to their children during the Great Depression? Or the women who saw every man in their lives—husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and sons—leave for the great wars, their minds consumed with worry, their hands burdened with holding down the American fort?

There is nothing simple about American life today, but to call it the “hardest time in history to be a woman” shows a shallow, self-centered view of history. I know that there are women today who still live in slavery, who still have no rights or opportunities, who live in war zones and have babies in fields, but I would argue that most of them are beneficiaries of at least some modern conveniences. And American women? I don’t know one who doesn’t find it difficult to juggle all the responsibilities of her life—but we do it in warm (or air-conditioned) houses, driving warm (or air-conditioned) cars, sipping lattes and checking our e-mail.

Not a day goes by when I am not somehow grateful to be living at this time in this place. It’s far from perfect, and life is hard for everyone, but I’ll take our “hard” over history’s “hard” any day. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

A funny thing has happened at kindergarten this year. This mom has learned one of the Big Lessons of her life. I wasn’t looking forward to kindergarten again. I secretly felt done with the phonograms and the “100 Days of School” party, done with meeting throngs of new people, done with that whole phase of life. We’ve been at our school seven years now, and I’ve settled into some deep friendships with other moms. My son Braden’s friends are all first-borns, like him, and their parents are very similar in age to us. We have multiple sets of brother-sister friends and families who mesh nicely, comfortably, easily with our own.

Problem is, I wasn’t done. Camryn was ready for kindergarten.

She was born when I was 36. And a half. That makes me the grandma of the kindergarten class. As the other moms filed in on orientation night, some pregnant, some pushing strollers, I decided that since these were probably not going to be my new best friends in terms of shared live experiences, I’d ask God what role He wanted me to play with this group of parents.

In years past, when I met the kids and parents in my children’s classrooms, I instinctively sniffed out those who seemed to have the most natural friend potential and focused on knowing them. This year I didn’t go in with that (or any other) agenda. And here’s the big ah-ha moment: When I stopped jockeying for social position—both my own and my child’s—I was able to see people in Camryn’s class I never would have noticed otherwise. I spent the entire Thanksgiving party visiting with a mom from another country. Her daughter looks like no one else in the class. (A multicultural school we are not.) Mother and daughter both stayed far outside the circles of cute, social moms and cute, social kids. I didn’t see another person talk to either of them, actually. But their story—which includes an arranged marriage and a college degree earned in an unknown language—is fascinating. And I would have missed it if I’d been focused on “people who seem like us.”

While setting up a mother-daughter outing with this family, I received a simple e-mail message written in broken English: “Thank you for the love.”

It broke me. This is all it takes to show love to someone? Chatting for an hour over “Pin the Waddle on the Turkey” and getting together for a quick play date? Could God really use such minuscule, natural things? Then came a more powerful second revelation: How many other opportunities have I missed over the years to love the unseen? Because I was so focused on myself?

Oh, God, forgive me! And thank you for using my fourth child, increased age and maturity, and one more round of kindergarten to open my eyes to your ways.