What is it about knowing a secret that makes it so difficult to keep? When someone tells you something in confidence and asks you not to tell anyone, you wouldn’t think of telling them you will tell other people; instead, you readily agree to keep the information confidential, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you will. As I am writing this, I am sitting on several confidences and I am struggling with the temptation to tell for different reasons with each one. I won’t tell because I have learned not to, but it is a reminder about how hard it can be to keep quiet.

Here are some of the reasons you might be tempted to divulge confidential information:

• You are upset and need to talk about it with someone else.
• You want to be the first to say you knew.
• You dislike the person who told you and want to tell others about it to make the person look bad.
• You thrive on gossip and drama and love to be the center of it.
• You don’t have good self-control over your mouth.
• You have an opinion about it and want someone to side with you.
• You want to give the person the advantage of knowing something that could affect them.
• You are trying to mediate and fix relationships between other people.

All of these reasons aren’t good enough to break your promise to the person who shared confidential information with you. And yes, it does take self-control not to gossip. It takes patience to wait until you can talk about something without breaking a confidence. It takes strength to hold your own opinion without others agreeing with you. It takes strong character to resist the temptation to join in the gossip and drama. And it takes healthy boundaries not to mediate and fix when it isn’t any of your business.

Good relationships are safe. Safe relationships involve trust. When someone trusts you enough to share information with you, you should reward that trust by keeping it to yourself. The only situation that would warrant you sharing the information is when it is a matter that involves someone’s safety.

By Karla Downing

Relationship Devotional Prayer

God,

Help me to be a person who keeps my word that can be trusted to keep confidential information to myself.

Relationship Devotional Challenge

• Can you be trusted to keep confidential information to yourself?

Scripture Meditation

Proverbs 11:18

“A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret” (NIV).

Proverbs 18:8

“The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s inmost parts” (NIV).

Proverbs 26:20

“Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down” (NIV).