Honesty vs. Vulnerability

My heart sunk as I heard the gate to my backyard swing shut.  And my mind rushed back to 20 minutes earlier when my wife had yelled out “I’m back (from my walk) and I’m leaving with [daughter #2]”.  I distinctly remembered hearing the jingle of Cooper’s collar has he came out back for a bathroom break…and now he was nowhere to be found!

Cooper is our four-year-old Cockapoo and he has been known to have low self preservation skills, especially if there is a bird/squirrel/rabbit in his line of sight. 

I had been moving bags of mulch from the car in the driveway back into our playground area and I had not latched the gate completely when I finished (and before the doggy doo doo).

Some mixture of guilt, shame, and panic crept over my psyche.  I immediately started looking around the street in hopes that he had just wandered out the open gate and not darted after a woodland creature, running who knows how far.  I soon went back inside and told my kids that I was going to head out looking for him and to please double check inside the house.

I walked, and searched, and whistled expectantly; all the while avoiding the gnawing in my soul to tell my wife what had happened.

Eventually I made a pretty wide lap through the neighborhood, checked back in at home, jumped in my car to widen the search, and text my wife “Cooper took off”.  She immediately text me back “Cooper is with us”. Wait, what?!?

All the while I was wrestling with my perspective, my reality, and how to communicate honestly, I was wrong about the facts.  It wasn’t until I opened myself up (being truly vulnerable), that I was able to have the truth spoken into my reality.

I truly feel that we all (or most all) have experienced similar situations like this, where our narrow perspective or shamed-based narrative, has kept us running in circles and actually kept us from arriving at a successful solution until we became vulnerable and brought in another person.

It struck me as an accurate word picture to describe a recovery methodology that I have found a little abstract to communicate, so I wanted to share my experience with you.

Vulnerability is not without its bumps and bruises, but moving past rehearsing the right answer or hiding behind naivety, and allowing truth to be spoken into incorrect thought processi is where growth and maturity are allowed to develop.

So surround yourself with safe, trustworthy people that will speak into your perspective and not only affirm your honesty, but nurture your soul by rewarding your risk of vulnerability.