maybe bravery is just being honest when it's easier not to

​Harry Miller recently medically retired from the Ohio State football team. On the surface, he was a star athlete. Beneath the surface, he was spending his days trying to talk himself into living. On the football field, he was a man headed to the pros. In his home, he was a man cutting his wrists and worrying about how God might receive him after taking his own life.

Miller said, "A person like me who supposedly has the entire world in front of them, can be fully prepared to give up the world entire. This is not an issue reserved for the far and away. It is in our homes. It is in our conversations. It is in the people we love."

Miller credits his coach and his program for helping him find help, and for putting him in a position to continue offering help. As a result, his words have been shared widely on social media. Yesterday, he stared into a camera on The Today Show, in tears, and promised a hurting world there is more hope than they believe.

As he spoke, his tears became my tears.

I think it was these words: "People have called me brave, but to me it just felt like not dying. It felt like being honest. Maybe bravery is just being honest when it's be easier not to."

I've come to know that being honest is letting go of secrets. Not secrets like I walked out of the grocery store with a Snickers bar I didn't pay for. Secrets like I'm a dead man walking.

Miller said in an another interview, "“Maybe it was hard to see the scars through the bright colors of the television. Maybe the scars were hard to hear through all the talk shows and interviews. They are are hard to see, and they are easy to hide, but they sure do hurt. There was a dead man on the television set, but nobody knew it.”

I had a conversation with a friend several years ago. It was the first brave conversation of my life. It was the first conversation I'd ever had about secrets. Nothing felt brave about that conversation. It only felt life-giving. It felt like not dying.

Here is the thing about that. I'm not the only one getting five decades into my life trying to figure out how to have brave conversations. I'm not the only one getting five decades into my life holding on to secrets. I'm not the only one holding on to my secrets for dear life until life no longer feels dear at all.

And sadly, more and more, it's only taking a couple of decades until life no longer feels dear for our young people and our kids. Miller said he first talked about taking his life when he was 8 years old.

It's catching up with us in epidemic and pandemic ways. This secret keeping we do. This inability to have brave conversations with one another. Because it IS an inability more than it is a willingness.

We don't practice brave conversations with one another. We don't learn how to have them to the point that we ultimately do what we do with most things we aren't skilled at. We avoid them. Social media has taken this avoidance to an even higher level; it's shaping us to believe secrets and hard conversations don't even exist anymore.

Steven Furtick says, "What you are seeing on your Reels is not real. I wonder what happened five minutes after they posted that. I mean just five minutes, not five years."

I'll tell you what I think happened. Many of them returned to their secrets. But they left us with a growing impression we're the only one who has them. And we hold on to them all the tighter. With dear life. Until life is no longer so dear.

I'm going to tell you, when you share you secrets, life in an instant feels less lonely. I don't think it's what we're looking for when we let secrets go, but it's what happens. A loneliness we didn't know was married to our secrets, for a moment disappears in our bravery.

Vivek Murthy, who wrote a book on loneliness, says, "people wouldn’t come up me and say 'I’m lonely,' but they would say things like 'I feel like I have to deal with all of these struggles on my own' or 'I feel like if I disappeared tomorrow, nobody would even notice' or 'I feel like I’m invisible.' What I realized is that whether people were struggling with addiction or depression or violence in their communities, what was weighing on them most was the sense of having to deal with these challenges all alone."

Our secrets are our greatest challenges. The greatest weight of those challenges is carrying them alone. We carry them alone because we've become a world built on relationships that have escaping or avoiding challenges as a primary goal, and not embracing them as the greatest form of togetherness we can have.

I think much of our world is fake. We live in a world built to hide our secrets. Protect us from them. Me protecting me. You protecting you. The result is a Reel world that is no longer real. And more and more every day, our friends and family can no longer handle the Reel world or the real world.

I think we need a brave new world.

We need a world that sits at the dinner table and bravely asks, what's the hardest thing going on in your life, not how did you do on your test or how did practice go?

We need churches that will quit promoting the forgiveness of our secrets as a way to avoid being a church that bravely shares in them with one another. Not for the sake of shame, but for the sake of togetherness. And love.

We need friends who can walk through the woods and stop and bravely ask, can I tell you something?

We need a world that has permission to quit pretending there are no secrets, and bravely start sharing them with one another.

Because I'm here to tell you, secret sharing really isn't brave. It's simply not being lonely.

It's not dying.