Don’t be afraid to be real. The truth makes us free, so tell it.

In a June 4 op-ed for the Herald-Leader, Our Voices columnist Lisa A. Brown said something insightful that I wanted to elaborate on.

She was writing about the ways in which daily encounters with racism can stress Black people and erode their mental health.

What caught my eye was an anecdote about an appointment Brown had at her physician’s office. She was experiencing chest pains. A nurse asked if she was depressed.

“I quickly responded no,” Brown wrote. “She then inquired how I managed stress. I explained I was a Christian and my faith helped me deal with the blatant racism and discrimination I encountered at work.”

Actually, Brown was overwhelmed, but couldn’t say so.

“What I failed to tell the nurse is that within the Black faith community, we have catch phrases like ‘too blessed to be stressed’ or ‘too anointed to be disappointed,’” she wrote. “We proudly wear these sayings on tee shirts as if we’ve arrived at some spiritual hierarchical plateau that makes us immune to the harsh reality of being Black in a white America.”

She continued: “Although these catchy phrases are designed to strengthen our faith, they have the polar opposite effect on our mental health. They do not provide an outlet to express how we really feel. We’ve managed to equate Christianity with a guaranteed pass freeing us of everyday life stressors. We fail to recognize faith and stress are not mutually exclusive.”

Yes and hallelujah.

However, this phenomenon isn’t confined to Black Christians. White Christians also are afflicted with this dysfunctional view of faith. I’ve personally suffered from it.

In fact, sometimes people who aren’t religious wrestle with a secular variation of this. You see it whenever you scroll through acquaintances’ curated social media posts—all is sunny and perfect. Every husband’s a hero. Every child’s a genius. Every pet is Rin Tin Tin. But that’s grist for another column.

Indeed, God is good. Life’s a beautiful gift. But life is also hard and murky and disappointing. Why are so many of us unwilling to say that?

In church, this inability to speak candidly stems from a mistaken idea of what it means to be a Christian. The confusion seems to have begun, as many errors do, as a corrective to a previous error.

For centuries, Christians were taught to wallow in their weakness, poverty and worm-like unworthiness. This resulted in generations of defeated, fatalistic, pessimistic churchgoers. The more miserable you felt, the holier you were.

I remember a friend saying that if his mother didn’t come out of church feeling as if she’d just gotten a whipping, she didn’t consider it much of a service.

In my own early days as a Christian, I heard this testimonial regularly: “Oh, the devil’s been on my heels all week. Y’all pray for me that I’ll hold on faithful ‘til the end.”

Disgusted by down-in-the-mouth, self-defeating religion, certain preachers started focusing a few decades ago on the positive.

Christians were destined to be overcomers, they said. With faith we could move mountains. We were wonderfully made, the sons and daughters of almighty God.

There was no addiction we couldn’t reverse, no demon we couldn’t rout, no illness we couldn’t surmount if we believed God’s great promises instead of spewing negativity. We could speak miracles into existence.

This teaching was beneficial. To a point.

Once, during some now-forgotten difficulty, I was asked by a church member how I was bearing up.

“Pretty well under the circumstances,” I said.

“What are you doing under there?” she said.

I realized she was right. I didn’t have to be a prisoner of these circumstances; with the Lord’s help, I could transcend them.

Still, as often happens, the corrective became as corrosive as the illness. Given the chance, humans will take any good thing to absurd extremes. That tendency must be in our DNA; anything worth doing seems worth doing to excess.

Many of us took a great idea—focus on the upside, expect God’s deliverance—and turned it into a legalistic fetish, a toxic positivity. We became so obsessed with positivity we no longer could acknowledge, much less address, unpleasantness.

We weren’t allowed to experience failure. We couldn’t ache or mourn or doubt. Every word out of our mouths had to be upbeat.

We couldn’t be what we are: multi-dimensional humans. Full of faith, yet frail, flawed and afraid.

We now need a corrective to the corrective. We need to get honest. The truth is, life and faith are messy.

Yes, we’re faithful … except when we don’t believe any of it. Yes, the Lord is our healer … but our back hurts like hell. Yes, the Lord is our provider … but our checkbook hasn’t gotten the news yet. Yes, our family is a gift … but we’d gladly re-gift them. Yes, the Lord has given us a sound mind … with an assist from Prozac.

We’re saints and we’re sinful. We’re powerhouses and we’re whiners. We’re martyrs and we’re narcissists. All at the same time, inside our same skin.

That’s how God made us, apparently. That’s why we need a savior. Fortunately, God knows our foibles and loves us anyhow.

We can be animated by hope—and admit we’ve got a long way to go.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.