Coming to the point of being willing to confess is difficult. Begin with prayer. Start with the word if. Tell God if you would be willing to admit your faults to him, yourself, and another person. Or, if not (yet), talk with him about why. Face any inner resistance with humble curiosity. Ask what you might need in order to become willing. Consider the freedom you might feel if there was nothing hidden in your life. Consider the possibility of being embarrassed.

The fifth step is both humbling and freeing. But the “humbling” always comes before the “freeing,” never the other way round.

Hallelujah.

Begin to think about someone in your life whom you might develop such a relationship with. Imagine what this friendship might become. Desire it. Ask God for it.

Take a few moments to reflect on which people in your life have qualities you admire. One man said that he looks for a person of peace and serenity when he looks for somebody to whom he can entrust the secrets of his heart. Does the other person’s life reflect their stated values?

If you have someone in mind, don’t plunge too deeply into full disclosure. Trust must be built slowly, over time. You might share a relatively small personal secret or fault with a friend and see how they respond. Do they keep it a secret, or do they gossip? Do they move too quickly to give advice? Are they judgmental? (I know one man who told a friend about sexual temptations only to have him say, “I never struggle with lust.” That was the end of that conversation.)

Ask yourself if you are devoting the time needed to cultivate friendship. Make space for whatever the appropriate next step is for you: an invitation to coffee or a meal, taking a hike together through the woods, giving them a gift they would enjoy, reading a book and discussing it, taking a trip together.

Consider who might be your “one other person”. Look for these qualities:

• A person who offers deep acceptance

• A person who is a courageous truth-teller

• The ability to honor confidentiality

• Mutual joy in the relationship

When you’re ready. Take the step with one other person. Here’s a format you can follow:

• Start by acknowledging your fears

• Pray together

• Read the pages you have written

• Try not to rush

• You might start with what you most don’t want to talk about.

• Pray together to close

Besides these major overhauls, a fully disclosing friendship consists mostly of regular tune-ups.

People in recovery say that often it’s after taking this step of total honesty that agnostics or atheists find themselves for the first time beginning to experience the presence of God and that even those who believe in God now become aware of him in a deeper way.

Our accountability is ultimately to God, but a trusted friend can serve as God’s flesh-and-blood representative.

Keep coming back. It works if you work it.

Baylor’s research has found that people who view themselves as accountable to God have a higher sense of mattering to others, meaning in their lives, and dignity than those who don’t. Ask yourself two questions that can be used to measure this kind of “theistic accountability”:

• Do I decide what to do without relying on God?

• Do I depend on God for help and guidance?

But accountability offers the most powerful help when it includes a flesh-and- blood representative: “God with skin on.” So to help us live out our accountability to God, we also name our commitments to a trusted friend. We tell someone else the values we will seek to live up to in our finances, our truth-telling, our time, our sexuality, our anger, our parenting, our work—or whatever we struggle with. We tell them we will report in on how we’re doing and ask them to hold us to account. We do this not because we’re moral giants—if we were moral giants, we wouldn’t need this. But we do this because we are inadequate on our own, part of the Fellowship of the Withered Hand.