Tell the Truth to Yourself

It happened. I think a part of me always knew it would. How much longer could I continue to avoid the inevitable? This week the worst finally happened to me.

 An ALC kid drove my car into something. 

In the back of my head I always knew this was a possibility. Every single Cadre, YLC trusts literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cars to 18 – 22 year olds and somehow we’re all okay with this. Well this week a first year tried to park my Altima next to a truck that was too far over the line and ended up dragging the side of my car against said truck. The damage isn’t too bad, but they certainly made contact and now it’ll need to be repaired. 

I’m obviously not happy about this. There’s zero chance I’m trusting one of those kids with my car again. I’ll freaking take an uber to Cadre before I let them drive my car now. But, even though the situation sucks, I was super impressed with the way that they handled it. 

It was Tuesday evening and instead of going on the field trip I decided to hide in the office upstairs to get some work done (and by “work” I mean “writing for this blog”). Suddenly, Drew (one of the guys running Cadre right now) and two ALC students walk in and Drew asks if I have a minute. I knew then what had happened, why else would these guys seek me out like this. 

Drew then proceeds to tell me exactly what happened, how it happened, and what they were going to do because of it. He was clear, apologetic, and didn’t leave a single thing out. He told the truth, and all of it, right in front of the ALC kid who did it. And, at the end of it, the ALC guy who damaged my car looked me right in the eyes and said he was sorry. 

I was legitimately impressed with the way they handled it. 

When it was all done I looked at Drew and commended him. I told him that a lot of younger leaders wouldn’t have handled this the way that he did. Many young leaders are afraid of the truth when it can potentially reflect negatively on them. But Drew leaned into it. He confronted the truth head on and was a better leader for it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the truth, how it can either be our friend or our enemy, and how that choice is almost always up to us. The truth doesn’t change. It is what it is. But what we do with the truth and how we choose to apply it to our lives can change. 

There’s a song on the new Avett Brothers album called “Tell the Truth.” Honestly, most of the album is kind of a wash. But this one song has really been sticking with me. The chorus goes like this:

“Tell the truth to yourself, and the rest will fall in place”

And while I think there are aspects of this song that are a little heavy handed, I think we can learn a lot from this lyric. I think that, as a whole, we’re pretty bad at telling ourselves the truth. Especially in Fantasy Football. 

Fantasy Football is, mostly, a game of numbers. Player A put up this many yards and therefore has scored this many points. If my group of players scores more than your group of players, I win. There’s really not a whole lot of room for interpretation. However, I’ve found that Fantasy Football is often a game played with the heart. The players on our teams are more than just number generators, they’re actual humans we can watch on Television. And because of this, I think we’re really bad at telling ourselves the truth about them.

An exercise I like to do is to pretend I’ve never heard of any of my players before. A blind resume if you will. I’m going to have to do this with Juju this week. JuJu Smith-Schuster is obviously an incredibly talented WR. He can make any catch and run just about any route. He’s a no brainer in Fantasy Football. But is that really the truth? Because if I pretend that he’s just player X and look at his past four weeks, he only averaging FOUR catches a game. Worse, he’s only averaging 50 yards per game over his last four. Does that sound like a no brainer WR1? I dunno. 

Or maybe let’s look at one of my RBs who’s averaging almost ten carries a game. If you looked at my roster, you might assume this is Duke Johnson. But you’d be wrong, it’s Alexander Mattison, the backup to Delvin Cook who many people might consider to be a waste of a bench spot, especially in a league with our embarrassingly small benches. But, if you take away the name and just look at the stats, you can tell that there may be no more valuable backup in the league than Mattison. He’s already getting ten carries a game, imagine if (GOD FORBID) Cook goes down. He’s a top five RB. 

If we’re willing to tell ourselves the truth in Fantasy Football, we can see our rosters in a new way. And I think this idea holds true in many areas of our lives. We usually can’t fix what we’re not willing to admit is broken. 

We’re doing something really scary in my ministry right now. We’re having all of our leaders fill out an anonymous survey asking them questions like:

On a scale from 1 – 5, how likely are you to encourage someone else you know to serve in our ministry?

On a scale from 1 – 5, how well do you feel like you’re being cared for as a leader?

And we’re doing this because we want the honest truth. We want to know if we’re doing a good job creating a ministry and leadership experience that is helpful for people. And, while we hope the results are positive, we’re also okay if they are negative. Because you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. We’ll probably do something like this for our students around the first of the year that rates how much fun, helpful, and friendly our ministry is. That’ll be the real scary one probably.

When’s the last time you sat down with your boss and asked for some honest feedback about your performance? When’s the last time you had coffee with your spouse and asked them honestly “How am I doing?” When’s the last time you looked at your kids and asked, “What could I do to be a better Dad?” 

What areas of your life are you ignoring the truth. No matter how inconvenient the truth may be, it’s always better to know it. The truth is either a powerful weapon for success, or a terrible knife in our backs slowly bleeding us out. We get to choose which one. So this week, on your fantasy football teams, and in your lives, tell the truth to yourselves. Even if the truth chooses the manifest in the form of some poor 19 year old ALC kid driving your Nissan Altima into another car…