Guest post from Jimbo!

Honesty as a Doorway to Safety and Connection

Today I have some Jimbo wisdom for you! This post is adapted from his words shared with the Well Toccoa on October 20, 2025. Enjoy this picture of Jimbo with a Uruguayan chivito by way of introduction.

We were made with a deep calling toward Jesus, because He’s the one that knows us. He’s the one that formed our inner beings. He knows our minds, and He knows our hearts. We can’t lie to Him. We can lie to everyone else in the world. We can pretend all we want. We can’t lie to him because He knows us. And He created us.

We often use this picture of a hand. And when I go and speak in places, this is where I like to start,

because this is where the deeper life starts, right here —

understanding who God is, understanding who we are, and how God made us with six essential desires. We want to be loved. We want to have purpose, we want to be understood, we want to have significance, we want to be safe, we want to belong.

Do you feel loved right now?

If you were to look at God, and He was standing in front of you, and He were to ask you, “Do you feel loved?” What would you say?

Do you feel safe?
Do you feel understood?
Do you feel like you belong?
Do you feel significant?

I’m not asking if you know you are. I’m asking if you feel it.

Sometimes we get the backlash — we even sing it in the song — we’re not going to trust our feelings, etc. I get it. We don’t want to build our theology around feelings, but feelings are so important. Why?

Because feelings tell us what we’re believing about our reality right now.

They do. It might be a lie.

That’s why we don’t base theology on it or build principles on it. But you better pay attention to your feelings, because how you feel is communicating a lot about what you think about yourself and what you think about God.

It’s here that we can learn to be honest, and actually tell God that I don’t feel loved.

I believe that You are love, but I don’t feel — I don’t know your love. 

I “know” you love me, and I love you, but I don’t feel love right now. 

I feel like I am unseen. 

I feel like I don’t know my way. 

I feel completely abandoned and alone and separate and insignificant. 

Can we learn to be this honest? 

This isn’t something we may want to broadcast. 
But tell God. He already knows. You don’t have to fake it until you make it. Be honest right where you're at, and that’s where Jesus will meet you. 

1 John 1:9  tells us to tell the truth. That’s what confess means. This verse tells us to tell the truth about our separateness (that’s what sin is). When we tell the truth about our separateness, He’s faithful to erase the effects of our separateness. 

Our biggest problem is that we were made to be connected with the source of all of these things — love,  understanding,  belonging, safety, significance, and purpose. We were made to be receiving all of these things straight from God. So Adam and Eve had this in the intimacy of the garden, but because we have separated ourselves, we live in separateness from all these things. We wander, looking for significance; we look for love; we look for all these things. We’re looking in all the wrong spots — like the empty cisterns — we’re looking in all the wrong spots to be satisfied. 

But then we come to church, and we talk to each other and ourselves about how God is good, and God is love.  We hear preaching - "You are loved!" And we say amen, and we believe it. We really do. 

Then we walk out, but our actual experience that we’re living — our reality right now and the memories that we are living from — say, 
"You’re living in fear because you feel insignificant and broken." 

So Jesus says, 
tell me the truth about your separateness, just tell Me! 
I'm faithful! I will cancel the effects of your separateness. 

We want to learn to pray. 
We’re saying, "Lord, teach us to pray." 
The doorway of honesty is one of the first things that we come to. 
God meets us in our honesty.  We can lie to ourselves all we want. We can say "we're good" all we want.

But if we want to meet...

I’m not saying He’s gonna fix it just like that (even though one encounter can change anything). But I do know that as we’re honest, and we tell the truth to Him,  He meets us. 
There is lament stored up; there’s brokenness stored up; there’s all kinds of things that block us and keep us from being honest.  And we’re afraid of a mess, honestly. 
So many times I’m afraid of the snotty mess that it’s going to create. So I don’t do it. 

I choose to be separate when I don’t let God have all of my mind. 

Sometimes I just let Him have the half that’s intellectually in agreement with Him, but the other half I just live in my own dark little closet. 

The process of opening up and being honest with God is a journey. 
Keep coming back.
Keep being honest.  
Tell the truth.  
If we confess the truth, if we can tell the truth, He is faithful to cancel the effects of our separateness. 

I was thinking about John chapter 4 and the woman at the well.  Here’s this woman who has lived and who is living in shame, separateness, and disgust, completely separated from who she really is. And she meets Jesus. 

Jesus said that He had to go through Samaria. He goes; He meets this woman, and she begins to truth tell. You notice that? He asks her questions, and she’s almost kind of cocky, but she’s truth telling.  Then when He truth tells about her, and it comes out of His mouth what’s true about her, when there’s no way He could have known that, all of a sudden she starts to change the subject. 

And then Jesus still meets her. 
He pulls back the curtain for the first time in Scripture, to this separated, adulterous living-in-a-lie woman. And she’s the first one to hear, "I am the Messiah." 

No one else knew. He had not told anyone that. But because she was truth telling, he truth told right back to her. 
That brief encounter could have been only a few minutes (unless there’s a lot more that happened that was not written down), but in that couple of minutes, through that conversation, she encountered Jesus. 

He called her out. He was saying, essentially, "I see who you claim to be. I know your background. I’m calling you up because you know who you are. You’re a witness. You are a leader of men and women. I know who you are."

She leaves and goes back into town and begins to tell people immediately. 
She begins to be who she really is. 
And the people begin to believe. 
They come out and meet Jesus, and they beg and plead with Him to stay two more days, and he stays two more days. 
And many believed; many encounter Jesus. Many met him and knew him, and were called into who they were. 

What would it look like today for you to be honest with God about how you do or do not feel love, safety, understanding, significance, purpose, and belonging?

After Jimbo shared this talk at the Well, we practiced meeting with God in Safe Space together. If you would like to practice honesty with God using a guided prayer exercise, the exercises in my Safe Space Pathways book can help.

If you would like to receive a facilitated prayer session with someone coaching you through the process of being honest with Jesus, the Well Toccoa would be honored to facilitate that for you. Find out more here.

Also, we learned a lot about this idea of confession as truth telling from Jamie Winship. Look him up on youtube or check out his materials at identityexchange.com.