I don’t feel like it.
I can’t come over, I have to take my pet fish for a walk.
The dog ate my homework.
You’ve heard all of these. Some of them probably sound familiar coming out of your own mouth. One of them is outlandish on purpose.
Here’s the thing though. Every one of them could be true. A dog really could eat your homework. You really might not feel like it, for a reason or for no reason at all. And I don’t know, maybe somebody out there has figured out how to walk a fish. Science does strange things.
But if we’re being honest, guys and gals, most of the time that isn’t what’s happening. Most of the time we say something to save face.
A couple weeks back I wrote about there being one truth, and that it isn’t yours or mine. This is that same truth pointed the other direction. At myself.
A white lie is still a lie
We soften it by calling it white. Doesn’t change what it is. Dressing a lie in white doesn’t make it honest.
Usually we tell ourselves we’re protecting the other person’s feelings. Sometimes that’s even true. But a lot of the time we’re protecting our own, because the honest answer means admitting something about ourselves.
You don’t want to go to your friend’s house.
You don’t want to do the homework.
You don’t want to practice.
“So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body.”
Ephesians 4:25
I carry a guitar in my truck
I’ve learned to play it a little. I don’t play it enough.
I can give you reasons. I’m tired, which is true. I don’t feel great, which is sometimes true. There are a hundred other things I could be doing, which is always true.
The actual answer is simpler. I’m choosing to do something else.
That’s it. No story required. I’d rather do the other thing, and the guitar sits in the case another night.
Saying it plainly is uncomfortable. It’s also the only honest version.
The junk food
My wife meal preps for me. She makes healthy food for the week so I’ve got real nourishment out here instead of whatever’s sitting by the register.
And I kept gaining weight.
There’s no mystery here, and I want to be careful how this gets told. It would be easy to say I don’t know what’s going on and let her stand in the kitchen wondering what she’s doing wrong. That’s a lie by omission, and it puts it on her.
The truth is I have a junk food problem. Out here I buy candy, chips, cookies, whatever’s at the counter when I stop. That has nothing to do with her cooking. That’s my decisions.
I know it’s my decisions, because when I stopped for a week my body responded immediately. No hidden cause. Just the obvious one.
It isn’t something I’m proud of, and it’s still something I battle with. But it’s mine.
The trailer in Iowa
The bigger version of this cost me most of a day.
I was at a vendor in Iowa picking up a load. It was dark. I had a flashlight. I was well ahead of schedule, which somehow makes it worse. I hooked up to a trailer and pulled out.
Got down the road to a CAT scale and my weight was nowhere close to what it should have been. Pulled off the scale, walked to the back of the trailer.
Not only was it the wrong trailer. It was empty.
Call to dispatch. Two to three hours back the way I came. And by the time I got there the vendor had already called my dispatcher to say the driver signed for this load and it’s still sitting on our dock.
Half a day gone, at least. Then back to the scale, then into the rail yard, way behind where I should have been.
What actually happened
I check two things on every pickup. Trailer number against the paperwork, and seal number against the paperwork. Two checks, and they catch different mistakes.
I checked one. I did not check the seal.
I was out of my routine and I was in a hurry, and I skipped the step that would have caught it in thirty seconds.
I could have built an excuse. It was dark. The yard was laid out badly. Somebody moved a trailer. All of that would have been at least partly true, and none of it would have changed the fact that I didn’t do my second check.
So I told my dispatcher exactly that. I missed the seal. That’s on me.
There were consequences from the company, and they were fair. I’d have had a harder time respecting them if there hadn’t been.
“People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.”
Proverbs 28:13
Would you respect the excuse?
Think about the last time somebody gave you a story you didn’t believe. Not a lie about anything serious. Just a thin reason for why they couldn’t do something.
Now imagine they’d said instead, honestly, I just don’t want to.
Which one would you respect more?
I know my answer. I’d rather have somebody tell me straight that they don’t want to come over than sit through a story we both know isn’t true. I’m a grown man. I can hear it.
You’d rather play video games than mow the grass? Fine. At least you said it.
Own it, then learn from it
We all make mistakes. Nobody out here is perfect and nobody’s asking you to be.
The part that matters is what you do after. Own it. Be honest about it. Then learn from it and try not to let it happen again.
That’s what I tell my kids. Apologize, own what you did, learn from it, and we move on. I’m not going to harp on you past that.
And when there’s something you just don’t want to do, skip the excuse and skip the justification. Try the harder sentence instead.
I’m not prioritizing that right now. It isn’t important enough to me today.
That’s a rough thing to say out loud. It’s rougher to hear yourself say it, because then you have to look at what you are prioritizing instead.
Which is probably the whole point. We make time for what we care about. The excuses are usually just a nicer way of not admitting what that is.