No matter what your politics, or whom you believe, the following is true.
When we desperately hope that the actions we took and the practices we indulged in did not cause us to do something stupid and that someone might find out about them...when we we fear that our actions may have led to harm to ourselves more than we fear that they may have harmed others...when we obfuscate in order to avoid discussing the things we did that might have led, with without our intending to, to harming others or ourselves, whether or not they actually did result in harm, we are on the very human, but very slippery and soul killing slope of fear, pride, dishonesty and loss of integrity.
It takes immense courage and nobility of soul to avoid that slide and face the loss of power, the derision, the sense of shame and and the terrifying sense of personal failure that will result if we speak the full truth about ourselves.
Almost all of us are not fully capable of instinctively rising to that level of courage and honesty. For almost all of us, our first and strongest instinct is preservation of our sense of ourselves and our actions being acceptable, or at least, excusable.
But we whether we choose to speak the truth about our stupid habits or our awful actions, or our fully consciously chosen sins now, and suffer the frightening, ominous consequences now (and experience the freedom that comes from that truth speaking as well), or not, we are guaranteed that we will be irrevocably required to fully understand the truth about all of those things and that they will be, at a completely unavoidable time, fully, and completely publicly known.
We may choose: now or later.
Those who understand the freedom to change and the freedom from fear that comes from full self-knowledge and acknowledgement of stupidity, thoughtlessness and sin will choose it sooner, in spite of the immediate and sometimes extreme pain and difficult consequences it causes to themselves and to those who hoped they were better than they are.
Those who do not will continue to add to the pile of destructive speech and actions that haunt them, consciously or subconsciously, and the obfuscations, and the misplaced hope that nothing bad resulted, until that final, guaranteed, irrevocable unveiling of the full truth and all its consequences happens.
No wonder Zeezrom trembled when he began to see.*
There are two questions that come to each of us from this truth.
Which path will we choose?
And how will we teach the rising generation?
*Alma 11:43-44, 46
