"Oh What a Tangled Web!"

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." - Sir Walter Scott

I have been living a lie. A big lie. Well, some people would call it a white lie. But, frankly, even with my best word search tools, I can’t find the version of the Bible which reads: “Thou Shalt Not Lie (except for little white lies.)”  And after this experience, I can see why God went to all the trouble to carve this command on the Top Ten list.

You see, today is a very big day in my wife’s life, a BIG birthday. No, I will not reveal how big. I will just say that I got married as a junior in college, and my bride was of “marrying” age. You do the math. Now, as this big day approached I had to come up with some really big surprise. I knew the one thing that my wife would love is if our children and their spouses and our grandsons would all be here. Getting them here was easy. The surprise was not. Which is where the web of lies became necessary.  The problem is that over the course of two months the lie had to get bigger and bigger, and the number of people who had to play along grew.  In the last days I was making fake hotel reservations, doctoring the pages to make it appear we were going away for the weekend.   And each time she would bemoan that “Too bad the boys can’t come to see their grandma on her birthday,” we all would need to create a complicated fabric of untruths, each of us trying to remember who said what and when. Add to the weekend a surprise dinner party, and now the big lie involves 14 adults. Some of my wife’s best friends haven’t called her in a week for fear of spilling the beans! And whenever someone would say something contrary to the agreed upon outline of deception, I needed to come up with even more devious and deep, dark stories of deception. All of which was resolved in joy and tears when children and spouses and those little boys showed up out of “nowhere” last night. 

But I think God, and Sir Walter, got it very right.  Just don’t lie. The web gets tighter and tighter.  And pretty soon, the whole deception hangs on one tiny strand of the vast web which, if it breaks, will cause a bigger mess than getting a spider in your hair. After this experience I cannot imagine the pressure that must exist from living a real lie. I don’t want to find out, and I strongly recommend against it. Well, actually, God’s words on the subject are a little stronger than a recommendation. And one day we can ask God if deception which has a greater good as its end is breaking the commandment or not.  I am not going analyze that right now, because the big birthday surprises are still coming.  And that’s no lie.  Happy Birthday, dear. (Don’t worry; she never reads these until Monday. That’s what she tells me anyway. That’s the truth, right dear?)