Value Four: Vulnerable

On Masks, Truth and Grace

Oct 23, 2025

man riding on go kart — Photo by Adam Rutkowski on Unsplash

I went go-karting recently and had to wear a balaclava and helmet. It didn’t feel constricting at the start, it hardly ever does, but over the course of an hour, the heat built, the air thinned, and I could feel the pressure rising. By the end, I couldn’t wait to pull it off. The moment I did, the rush of air across my face felt like freedom.

I don’t know about you, but there’s a quiet relief that comes when you take off a mask.
The air feels different – cooler somehow, freer. You don’t realise how heavy it’s been until it’s gone.

Vulnerability feels a lot like that. You don’t notice the weight at first. You tell yourself it’s just what’s needed – protection, professionalism, keeping it together. But slowly, almost without realising, it starts to press in.

Maybe you’ve felt that too – that moment when the air feels heavy and you long to breathe again.

The Many Masks

When I was a teenager, I became very good at playing parts. There was ‘church’ Josh, ‘college’ Josh, ‘home’ Josh – each one slightly different, each one shaped to fit. Home Josh was the closest to just Josh. I never felt unsafe there – my parents did a beautiful job of creating space for me to be myself, and I am so grateful for that. I recognise not everyone had that safe space and I’m lucky. But still, somewhere along the way, I picked up this quiet belief that to keep everyone happy, I had to keep myself together.

I don’t think I was being fake. I was just trying to be liked, to belong. But between all those shifting versions, I started to lose sight of who I really was. I learned early on that honesty could be costly. That if you said the wrong thing, or felt the wrong way, you might disappoint someone. So I learned how to smile through the tension. How to blend in. How to be agreeable enough to stay safe.

But it’s exhausting living that way.

You can only hold your breath for so long before something inside you starts to ache.

Looking back, I realise I wasn’t being honest – not with myself, not with God, and not with anyone else. And that dishonesty, even when done to protect, quietly corrodes the soul.

Grace and Truth

Jesus once described Himself as “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). I used to skim over that line, but the older I get, the more I realise how radical it is.

Grace without truth is sentimentality – it soothes, but never heals. Truth without grace is cruelty – it exposes, but never restores. We need both. And holding both requires vulnerability.

Because truth means being real about who we are – our doubts, our desires, our shadows and contradictions. It asks us to face what’s really going on beneath the surface.

And grace means trusting that we’re loved anyway. That we’re seen, known, and still chosen. Grace doesn’t ignore truth; it transforms it. It takes what’s broken and says, even here, there’s hope.

That combination – grace and truth – is what sets us free. Not one without the other, but the two intertwined. The God who tells us the truth about ourselves is the same God who refuses to stop loving us.

But to live that way, we have to stop pretending. We have to unmask.

Because the moment we unmask – before God, before others, even before ourselves – we make space for both grace and truth to do their work. Truth reveals. Grace restores. Together, they bring us home.

The Wild Goose

Someone recently asked me about the bird on the front cover of The Radical Recall to Rest – “Is it a duck or a goose?” It’s a goose. A wild one. In Celtic Christianity, the Holy Spirit was sometimes called the Wild Goose. It’s a wonderfully untame image – unpredictable, untidy, free.

Following the Spirit is rarely straightforward. It leads us off well-worn paths into places we wouldn’t have chosen – places where we have to depend rather than perform.

That, too, is vulnerability.

The Wild Goose doesn’t promise safety, but it does promise presence. It doesn’t lead us to comfort; it leads us to transformation. And that journey always involves risk – not the reckless kind that ignores wisdom or safeguarding, but the holy kind that asks us to trust. To step out of hiding. To let ourselves be seen. To believe that God will not abandon us there.

When we live with masks, we live divided – separate from ourselves, from one another, and from God. But the Spirit’s invitation is to live unencumbered. To stop editing ourselves into smaller versions and start trusting that the real, unfiltered self might actually be enough.

That’s how Jesus lived. He didn’t wear masks. He let Himself be known – laughing, weeping, tired, compassionate. He allowed others to touch His scars. Even after resurrection, He stayed open.

That’s divine vulnerability.

The Cost of Openness

But living this way costs something.

Being vulnerable doesn’t come easily to me. It’s one thing to write words in private; it’s another to let them live in public.

As the launch of my book draws closer, I feel that tension more sharply – the quiet awareness that soon my words will be out there, open to critique and interpretation, but also to connection. It’s strange, that mixture of fear and hope. Because vulnerability always carries both. We risk being misunderstood. We risk being hurt. But we also risk being transformed.

There’s no way to receive love without first making space for it. And that means being seen. To be seen is both terrifying and holy. It’s what we were made for, and what we often run from. The same light that exposes is the light that heals.

And maybe that’s the invitation of grace and truth – to live unveiled, unarmoured, unedited. Not for approval, but for connection.

Over the past few months we’ve explored three of A Curious Follower’s values:

Curiosity asks, what’s really going on here?
Attentiveness notices, I can see it.
Invitation says, can I share it with you?

Vulnerability is what comes next.

Vulnerability asks, will I still be loved if I’m really seen?

It’s the follow-through – the moment invitation costs something.

The truth is, you will lose some people when you live vulnerably. Those who preferred the mask may not know what to do with the real you. But you’ll gain others – the kind of friends who see you and stay anyway.

That’s part of the cost of discipleship.

Even Jesus faced it – misunderstood, rejected, betrayed. Yet He never stopped loving, never stopped revealing the Father’s heart. Vulnerability was not His weakness. It was His strength. And it’s still ours.

What Vulnerable Isn’t

Vulnerability doesn’t mean sharing everything with everyone. It isn’t recklessness, and it isn’t a disregard for boundaries. True vulnerability is grounded in wisdom.
It’s the quiet strength of integrity – when who we are on the inside matches who we are on the outside.

It’s the courage to let truth and grace meet in the open, trusting that God holds the space between.

When we live that way, something shifts. We become more compassionate, because we no longer need to pretend. We start to see people as they are – not as they perform to be.

And maybe that’s where healing begins – in those small, unguarded moments when we choose honesty over image, presence over performance. Vulnerability doesn’t remove the risk; it transforms it. It turns exposure into encounter, shame into belonging, fear into freedom.

Because every time we dare to be seen, we echo the life of Jesus – the one who made Himself known, who let Himself be touched, who loved without armour.

The Deep End of Faith

To follow Jesus is to wade into the deep end – beyond certainty, beyond image, beyond control. It’s choosing truth over pretence, grace over fear, love over performance. It’s trusting that God meets us not in our polish, but in our honesty. Because He always has.

The God who came near didn’t come with armour or sword. He came with skin, with tears, with laughter. He came vulnerable – he came human and was love.

As we move from Vulnerability towards our final value, Wonder, I keep noticing how closely the two are linked. Because wonder is only possible when we’re open. When the masks fall and our defences lower, the world starts to look different.

Light looks brighter. People seem softer. Grace feels nearer. Vulnerability is what makes wonder possible. It’s the doorway through which awe enters – not in the extraordinary, but in the deeply honest ordinary of our lives.

When we stop hiding, we start seeing. And when we start seeing, we discover that God has been there all along – patient, gentle, waiting for us to breathe again.

Josh | A Curious Follower

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