Abraham's family grew, the way he had asked, until it became a whole nation. And God did something with that nation that shows us how the entire human family is meant to work.
He divided it into twelve tribes, and into each tribe he placed a different gift. Not the same gift twelve times — twelve different ones. One family carried strength, another carried song. One carried wisdom, another carried mercy. One knew how to build, one how to heal, one how to lead, one how to wait. Twelve gifts, scattered among twelve families. And here is the point: no single tribe had them all. Not one of them was whole by itself. Each one needed the other eleven. That is why they were one family of twelve, and not twelve families of one — because God was showing them, and showing us, that the gifts are meant to be gathered. No one is whole alone. The human family only becomes itself when every gift is carried home and laid down side by side.
Then he set this small nation of gifts right in the middle of the world — at the crossroads where all the roads met and every nation passed through — so that the gifts could bless the whole earth. But the middle of the world is a hard place to stand. It is loud there, and crowded, and it is exactly where the old fear keeps its throne. And the loudest thing the fear whispers, in every age, is this: hide. Don't let them see what you really are. Perform. Keep up the outside, whatever is happening on the inside. If they ever saw the truth of you, they could never love you. That lie is the real stumbling block. It is the thing that trips the whole human family, in every land — the belief that we must hide our worst in order to be loved.
And into the middle of that nation, in the middle of the world, God raised up a king who broke the lie wide open. His name was David.
David was great, and David failed — badly, in ways that truly hurt people, in ways he could never take back. And here is what makes him one of the most important people who ever lived: he did not hide it. He wrote it down. He took his sin, and his shame, and his despair, and his long climb back out, and he turned all of it into songs — songs he knew the whole world would sing for thousands of years. Create in me a clean heart. I have done this evil in your sight. I am poured out like water. He let everyone see. He opened himself from the inside, all the way, and laid his whole heart bare in front of God and the entire human family, forever.
And the strangest, most healing thing happened. God did not love him less for it. God called him a man after his own heart — not in spite of the open confession, but because of it. Because David had found the secret that unlocks the third love.
You have heard the two great commandments: love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. But look closely at the end of that — as yourself. Hidden inside the second commandment is a third love, the one we keep forgetting: you are meant to love yourself, too. God, your neighbor, and you — three loves, and the whole law hangs on all three together. And here is what David learned: you cannot love yourself while you are hiding from yourself. The part of you that you keep in the dark, that you will not confess, that you perform over and pretend away — you cannot love that part, because you will not even look at it. Love can only reach what is carried into the light. So the way you come to love yourself is the same way David did it: you open. You confess. You let yourself be seen — by God, by someone safe, and finally by your own eyes — and you discover, the way David did, that you are still loved, all the way down. We are not cleaned from the outside in. We open from the inside out.
Here is the pairing David teaches, the sixth balance of God: strength and openness, held together. We think strength means never letting anyone see us weak. But God, who is stronger than everything, is also the most open being there is — the One most willing to be seen, to be moved, to be wounded for love. His strength is exactly what makes his openness safe: he is strong enough that nothing you could ever confess would scare him away. And he made us to be the same. The strongest thing David ever did was not knock down the giant. It was open his heart. A strength that has to hide is not strength; it is fear wearing armor. And openness with no strength underneath just collapses. But the two together — strong enough to be seen, open enough to be known — that is a heart that can finally love itself, and so love everyone else without fear.
And to everyone who opens like that, God gives two gifts named in the old letters. The first is hidden manna — a secret bread, an inner food the world cannot see: the deep, quiet nourishment of being completely known and completely loved at the very same time. Once you have tasted it, you are never starving again. The second is a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except the one who receives it. That name is you — the true you, your oldest and realest self, the name God has always called you in his own heart. No one else can read it, because no one else can be you. And the only way to receive it is to open from the inside, until you and God are looking at the same true name together — and you find, at last, that it is beautiful, and that it was always yours. To know that name is to remember who you have been all along.