Accountability is a Dirty Word

She sat across from me at my favorite campus coffee shop.  The night before she’d casually asked me to meet her to “discuss some things on her mind.”  She was my mentor, my role model and my friend.  I looked up to her and valued her opinion more than anyone else on campus. 

To say I was blindsided would be an understatement.  When she pulled out her notebook and opened to the list that chronicled all of my shortcomings and misdoings of the past few months, I could literally hear my heart pounding in my ears.  She loved me, she said, and she wanted to help me be better.  For Jesus.  Accountability is a necessary part of Christian community.

And I sat and listened.  The tears flooding in my eyes made it difficult to make out all those things on her list (she’d wanted to make sure her thoughts were clear and she hadn’t forgotten anything, after all), and 10 years later I still don’t recall many of the specifics of my failings as a Christian.  I do recall the way I left, after she had finished saying everything she came to say, on the verge of body wrecking sobs, with a hug and a “thank you.”  I thanked her for that wrecking ball of judgment.  I didn’t know any better.  In an instant I had become everything on that list.  I deserved that judgment.

I spent the rest of the evening experiencing a “dark night of the soul” if you will, wrestling with her words, allowing them to become truths, transforming them beyond her words, attaching them to Christ’s words.  I cried, and hurt and bled.  The wound created that afternoon was dug out a little more and suddenly guilt was a part of my faith.  Guilt was the part of my faith.

Months later she apologized for that afternoon.  Maybe she hadn’t handled it the best.  She didn’t have bad intentions; she thought she was helping.  Years later she apologized again.  Turns out someone had brought out their own list, regarding her shortcomings.  She finally understood what she had done all those years before.  She was so sorry.

Each apology acted like a bit of Neosporin on a gunshot wound.  A quiet whisper that there was healing that needed to be done.  A small sense of vindication that I did actually deserve to feel hurt, that I didn’t deserve that wrecking ball.  But Neosporin cannot heal a gunshot wound and while I quickly accepted her apology and moved on to happier topics I found my heart longing to go back.  To speak aloud how much that list haunts me.  To rehash and reopen.

It wasn’t until I participated in a ministry internship where I found myself in small groups and therapy like mentoring that I was finally able to do just that.  From the beginning I felt nervous about attending the small group.  I found myself waiting, tense and edgy, for someone to whip out their notebooks and reveal their lists.  I dreaded the accountability I knew was coming.  My memory of that day kept coming to the surface and I knew I needed to examine it.

When I went back to my journals from that time there is a clear distinction of before and after that dreaded accountability.  Before my prayers were filled with praises to God, joy in his love for me, wonder at his grace and goodness.  Did I write this?  I thought.  Did I once feel this way about God?  I don’t remember this relationship.  After my journal is filled with the shoulds and not enoughs.  I berate myself for not living up to all God wants me to do.  I am so undeserving.  I need to do more, earn more, give more.  God is the list maker and my faults are many.  These thoughts were familiar.  This relationship with God was familiar.

As I revisited and rehashed this experience I found myself asking what God’s heart was towards me on that day, and what it was towards her.  I started to see myself as God saw me.  I was not a list of failings.  I didn’t have to fix my faults in order to come into his presence.  Finally the wounds began to truly heal.  I began to have grace with myself for the first time since “After.”

And I realized something else.  His heart broke for the pain his children were inflicting on each other.  It broke for me, and it broke for her.  Forgive her too; she knew not what she was doing.  And I truly know that she didn’t.  She had bought the lines that had been fed to her.  Accountability is important.  Iron sharpens iron.  She was loving me the best way she knew how in that moment. 

We are still friends and we’ve revisited that day once more in our friendship.  I was able to finally articulate just how much that encounter had damaged me.  I spoke truth to how it shaped a misunderstanding of God and tainted the way I saw myself in his eyes.  And I told her how I’m working through it and changing my story.  And she was finally able to really apologize for the fullness of her mistake.

Accountability man, it’s a dangerous thing.  Used incorrectly it can have life altering effects.  Thankfully I would find that there is another way of accountability, a beautiful, necessary, life-giving way.  But that’s another story for another day.