If you’re like me, you can find a thousand excuses for putting off something you don’t want to do. I can walk a mile around a mess I don’t want to clean up. I can make twenty unimportant phone calls until I finally work up the courage to make that 
one really important and difficult call.
Sounds kind of like the way we interact with—or avoid interacting with—God. We sometimes spend lots of time talking to Him about everything except the things we should really be telling Him. I remember in high school literature class reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At one point, Huck finds himself in a moral quandary. He says, “I made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. . . . It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. . . . Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
Well said, Huck. When we’re struggling with sin or pain, we ought to tell it like it is. God already knows everything about us and sees what we’d like to hide. He knows you messed up. He knows your friend betrayed you. He knows you’re heartbroken over your parents’ divorce. He knows you’ve been living a lie. Why not be honest about how angry or afraid you are?
If you want God to help remove all the junk cluttering up your heart and mind, tell Him exactly what’s going on with you. When you purge, lay it out there. Look squarely at what’s in your heart and talk about it openly. Cleansing begins the moment you give yourself the freedom to be who you are—with all the pain and problems, failures and fiascos.
