Someone is Ready to Lie to You

If this were a nice, clean post, I would say the past year has been my year of doubt. In all honesty, it’s starting to stretch outside of those boundaries. The unit of time suggests that it’s something confined to the past, or that perhaps this post will provide the revelation that shot me toward a bright future at the turn of the decade.

But I am learning the value of baby steps instead of clean-cut leaps.

There are many ways I have dealt with this doubt. I’ve stopped talking to God when I couldn’t find answers, cried on the bathroom floor, read dozens of Psalms, memorized poetry; I even wrote a short fantastical story about a little girl who folded a paper boat for every question she had about life. She gets paper cuts from folding them and makes so many that her hands start bleeding and the boats take on a life of their own.

At the same time, I became obsessed with protecting myself from lies. I’ve kept people at arm’s length for fear they would withhold information or themselves from me, fleeing in the face of inauthenticity and disgusted with my own inability to be fully myself when I was hurting. I felt like a liar, and lying is on my list of convicting crimes. It is incredibly difficult for me to recover when I have been lied to.

The spiritual paralysis doubt had begun to cause kept me from reaching for truth - I was afraid it would mislead me, or that I would mislead others or hurt them. Due to a variety of weights on my shoulders, I also lost the capacity to avoid certain lies like “I’m okay,” or “No, I don’t want to talk about it,” or “I’m just tired.” In this web of confusion, I gradually came to the conclusion that it was impossible to live a lie-free life. Lies should just be accepted as an ever-present piece of my reality.

My New Year’s Eve came and went, and instead of an Instagram post oozing with declarations of God’s faithfulness, I found myself awake at 5 AM on New Year’s utterly terrified, questioning my faith, and certain that this next year would not be better than the last. Half asleep, I scrolled through my Bible app and was uninterested; I didn’t want to read it and I would never want to read it. This whole game of Christianity was not worth my time.

That’s when I think God got a bit fed up with Satan’s moves. That, He nudged, is a bald-faced lie. And you are choosing to believe it. This needs to stop.

I prayed words to Him over and over until they came out right in my head, then fell asleep.

I have always been confused by the balance of faith and doubt (aren’t we all). For much of my life, I shoved doubt away. Now, I think it is dangerous to have a faith without any doubt. I would even say that the grappling and wrestling I am in the midst of is not something I feel pressed to dispel from my life and relationship with God at the moment. However, I had forgotten something:

There is someone ready to lie to you at any moment.

I had thought about lies a lot, attempted to protect myself from them, recognized Satan’s lies in the lives of people dear to me…but somehow, I’d overlooked his hand-picked, Kailin-tailored lies. And I truly mean overlooked, because I was genuinely surprised when I started picking out the lies that had become a normal part of my world. I’ve started noticing them when I journal - things I pretend are doubt but I write as if they’re facts. As I’ve become increasingly aware of this, I found myself desperate to share my discovery:

There is a difference between doubt and believing a lie.

Satan’s lies to us are far more intricate than I had imagined. I don’t know who else needs to read this, but I feel charged with a sense of urgency when I say this needs to stop. Satan’s lies have been destroying my life and the lives of some of the most beloved people to enter into my story for the past year. I’m not interested in his active work in these parts any longer. He needs to get out.

And no, I don’t particularly want to read my Bible, though that’s pretty clearly the way forward. Tonight, it will probably only be a few verses. But like I said, baby steps are powerful. If you’ve been injured, you can’t just get out of bed and go sprinting down the hallway.

My baby step is a sheet of paper that will go on my wall. That’s where I’ll write down the lies as I see them; as God shows them to me. Satan’s lies came before our sin, so before we move forward, lies have to be explicitly named for what they are.

And if you want to join me, I can’t imagine Satan will be pleased. Time to expose the enemy.

words and photo by Kailin Richardson