“Let me be honest with you…”
The worst way to start a sentence. It always irks me to hear this.
What it presupposes is that all previous conversations were a stack of lies.
“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”
Augustine of Hippo
It is totally okay to say “Let me be completely transparent with you.” Depending on the relationship of the two parties conversing or perhaps in consideration of someone else’s time you might only give a snippet of the full story. Totally understandable.
“Let me level with you.” Let’s cut the fluff and get down to business. Rip off the bandaid. Don’t dance around things. Perfectly acceptable.
But lies have no place in society. Nothing good at least. When robbed of the truth, one bases one’s decisions on false pretenses. It only ends in ruin. Especially in this day and age with most data at your fingertips. And as the book of Nathan says, “Secrets don’t keep friends.”
Integrity is incredibly important.
Let your word ‘yes be ‘yes,’ and your ‘no be ‘no.’
Matthew 5:37
Even the bible knows that.
So if you don’t want to sound shady, just tell the truth all the time. If you can’t do that at least don’t give a disclaimer for the times you do negating the rest of what you say to people. Maybe it would be better just to say, “Hey I’m totally going to lie to you for a while” just to shake things up. Don’t make up an outlandish story instead stick to something within the realm of possibility. It might work better for you.
In a completely unrelated story, I locked a door at the office to which we had no key. I had to get in the said door in a somewhat time-sensitive manner. I watched youtube video after video on how to pick a lock with paperclips. Asking around, I also found out a co-worker came from two generations of locksmiths.
I ended up taking a mallet and whacking at the handle until it opened. It will forever bear the scars of trying to keep its secret treasures from me. Before you ask, I did yell “THE POWER OF THOR” before I smote said door.
To tell you the truth, it felt pretty amazing.
