An unmarried couple, living together for five years are attending your church. They are unmarried because the woman’s ex-husband is threatening to reduce child support if they do marry. The couple plans to marry next year when the child support ends. They are now asking to join the church: What do you do?

The post generated  some great discussion. Sadly, however, some commenters began to accuse the hypothetical couple of “fraud” and even “criminal” behavior because they were living together to avoid losing child support.

A similar situation developed on Salon about two months ago: Rebecca Golden wrote about her part-time job cleaning houses. It received many compliments from Salon letter-writers. But then a few folks noted that Ms Golden is on disability and, you guessed it, began to accuse her of benefits fraud.

When confronted with information gaps, people are quick to fill them. Unfortunately, we often choose to fill them with negative, rather than positive, assumptions.

After all, based on the information that Michael gave us, the hypothetical couple might just as easily been hamstrung by a vengeful, controlling ex-husband who knew that his ex desperately needed money to care for their disabled child, but who also enjoyed putting her in a “difficult” position by preventing her from being legally married.

And Salon readers could have thought to question whether those on disability can have some earnings (they can).  But in both cases, folks went straight for the jugular, despite the fact that the readers on Internet Monk are supposed to be Christians, and Salon readers are supposed to be liberal, hip, and intelligent.

Right.

Now, of course, I point this out because I am well-familiar with this sort of behavior: It is one of my specialities. I assume the worst about people and situations, even when the information that I have doesn’t really point to such a conclusion.

I’ve considered the following reasons for my negative assumptions:

1. I don’t want to look/feel like a fool, so I preemptively try and be clever. (So I figure I will be wise as a serpent and all that.)

2. I don’t want to be disappointed. (So I will assume the worst and if I am wrong, well, then I have a pleasant surprise!)

3. I’ve watched too many crime shows on TV.  (Bad Lainie!)

But whatever my reasons, these negative assumptions about others are bad things. They take up my time and energy in negative thought and self-righteous indignation. They can lead to my bearing false witness, and, perhaps more importantly, this way of thinking is a real bar to relationships with people.

(And can you imagine anyone wanting to join a church where people assume you are a criminal fraudster just because of your living arrangements?)

I’m working on finding other ways of filling gaps. . .I’m going to start, or try to start, with a bit of grace.

]]> http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2009/10/16/filling-in-the-gaps-badly/feed/ 0 http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2009/09/14/suck-it-up-vs-that-really-sucks-a-testimony-of-presence/ http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2009/09/14/suck-it-up-vs-that-really-sucks-a-testimony-of-presence/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:53:35 +0000 LainieP http://www.lainiepetersen.com/?p=461 A post on Internet Monk (on how the church needs to be a place where we can find companionship in repentance) brought up some memories for me. I’d like to share one of them.

At the beginning of 2008, I found myself embroiled in some utterly horrific personal circumstances. Things were so bad, I still have difficulty making sense of it all.  I had been wronged, and I had wronged others. I was both offender and victim, betrayer and betrayed.

(Never in a million years would I have thought that I would have done what I did, or ended up where I was.)

At one point, things got so bad that I had to take down this blog for awhile. This was a necessary, but devastating decision: This blog had become my lifeline. The one thing that I could do “right” at a time when everything was going so wrong.

I remember that cold January morning, several days after removing my blog, when I realized that I could no longer feel the presence of God.

(I overreacted, certainly, but in my confusion, rage and misery, I felt as though my life had been stripped of all meaning and purpose, and that included God.)

On the train to work, I realized that I was going to  have to let people know that I was now an atheist.

(I was perplexed as to how such an announcement ought to be made.)

In spite of everything, I had the good sense to postpone broadcasting my infidel state: I was in the office for a few hours when an email showed up in my inbox. It was from fellow blogger Shula (aka Sensuous Wife).

(I didn’t know her well, but that didn’t matter. Shula knew that I was in big trouble.)

She wrote:

“If you’re in a valley, I hope you’re not in there by yourself. If you’re in a foxhole, I’ll crawl in there with you and sit a while.”

(She didn’t offer to heal me, cure me, or fix me. She didn’t offer rebuke or “the truth in love”. She didn’t try to motivate me into wholeness. She simply offered to be present with me in my pain.)

Sitting with someone who is in pain and suffering is a tough thing to do. It is a tiresome, painful, and upsetting process.

(And yet Shula was still willing to do it.)

Our instincts often tell us to “fix” the problem, or to encourage the other to “fix” the problem themselves.

(If only it was that easy!)

It’s hard to sit  with someone who is full of pain and who can’t get beyond that pain or to take appropriate action: Particularly when that person bears responsibility for his/her circumstances. The temptation is so strong to just tell a person to “suck it up”, learn their lesson, and move on.

(As if being responsible for one’s own pain makes it any less painful.)

After receiving Shula’s email and offer of presence, we became friends. My behavior, thinking, and circumstances didn’t change right away, and in many ways, my pain (and behavior) became far, far worse before it got better.

(But I had someone with me. And she never went away.)

We can certainly make the argument that some people need to hear some “hard truths” to if they are ever going to change. I agree with this, and I am grateful for those friends who, during this bad time, confronted me with some of those hard truths.

But the fact that I needed to change didn’t nullify my pain, nor did it nullify my need for the presence of someone who could be my companion through this experience. Like most people in emotional pain, what I mostly needed was time to process, change, heal, and regroup.

(It took a bit more time than I thought I would.)

(But Shula gave it to me anyway.)

Thank you, Sister.

To both my relief, and dismay, I have discovered that there is indeed a pattern. My relief is the result of having detected a pattern, but my dismay is the result of discovering that this pattern is pretty complex.

To demonstrate, I am going to use the following (fictional) scenario as an example:

1. Someone calls me a “dummy”.

2. I react by feeling hurt, sad, angry, and confused.

3. My hurt feelings give rise to one or more of the following responses: I snap back with an insult of my own, I wander off feeling sorry for myself and trying to figure out why that person doesn’t like me, I begin to wonder if that person is going to try and turn others against me. . .and so on.

Notice that my responses (which take up the bulk of my time and energy) are not directly the result of being called dumb, but are instead in response to my hurt feelings. My responses are only secondarily connected to the situation: The time and energy that I invest in my responsive actions is primarily connected to my emotional reaction, not the incident itself.

This is a hard pattern to challenge and change, so lately I have been just trying to pay attention to this process.  I’m trying to catch myself between my emotional reactions and my continued response. I’d like to think that eventually I can get enough distance between the emotion and my response so as to figure out whether I am making an appropriate investment.

I’ll keep trying, anyway.

The total delay for the second car? Probably about three seconds.

Apparently this waste of three seconds was enough to make the second car’s driver very irate. He began to lean on his horn and curse the driver of the first car. Then the driver of the first car stopped his car, further delaying the driver of the second car, and responded with cursing and horn-blowing of his own. After a bit of start and stop, both drivers drove off the lot, gunning their engines as they did so.

The time taken up by the angry exchange? Probably about fifteen seconds, and I’d bet anything that both drivers were fairly steamed for at least a minute or two after they drove off.

Total time of delay: 3 seconds.

Total time of angry exchange: 15 seconds (at least).

So for wait of 3 seconds, the second driver (roping the first driver along with him) invested 5 times the length of the delay in unproductive honking, cursing, and, yes, being delayed even longer.

Christians might call this poor stewardship of time and emotional energy. The rest of the world would probably just say that this was a boneheaded thing to do. No matter what you call it, though,  the neither driver will ever get his squandered time or energy back.

After watching this little drama unfold, I came to the realization that I am often (ok, usually, even)  just as wasteful of my energy and resources as these drivers. A slight inconvenience, a careless word, or, in some cases, even a positive exchange can result in behavior that is totally out of proportion to the actual stimulus. Thus a good stimulus is minimized by wasted time and energy, while a bad stimulus has the distinction of being made, by myself, even more damaging because of energy and time I invest in it.

I have some thoughts on why I (and perhaps others) do this, and I will write about them in my next post. But for now, it is enough to remember those squabbling drivers, investing fivefold in their own misery over a measly three seconds.

(Ok, I am going to be transparent: I haven’t posted in a month because I’ve been too busy working on my much more popular tea blog. But I’ve realized that my ministry extends beyond tea, so I am going to try and be more regular about posting here.)

Back to transparency. As I discussed in my last post on this subject, we often seek to define transparency by what might be termed “transparency best practices”: We shift from “transparency” to things like accountability and honesty without considering what it is to be transparent. And as my blogging pal Paul Meyers noted in his comment, most people aren’t even good enough at being honest with themselves to be truly transparent.

Since I definitely fall into this last category, I had to think long and hard for an example of how to be transparent.

And then I thought of my glass teapots.

I own three teapots. One is white porcelain and opaque. The others are clear glass. I confess to being more fond of the glass teapots because I like to be able to see the tea leaves unfurl as they steep. I like to be able to watch the color of the tea liquor darken so that I can know exactly when the tea is ready to be poured. I like being able to see if the teapot is in need of emptying/cleaning at a glance.  I like being able to examine the leaves after I drink my tea without getting my hands wet.

I like being able to see right through those pots. And the interesting thing is that those pots don’t have to do anything other than hold my tea.  They don’t try to be transparent or function transparently. They are transparent.

Now humans are not teapots. Unlike a teapot we have personalities, moral agency, and intelligence. We have souls. But I still think that my humble teapots have something to teach us about transparency, namely that it is in large part dependent on what we are made of: If we build up a persona out of defensiveness and/or opportunism, it won’t matter how “accountable” or honest we are to others, we still aren’t going to be transparent.  We will continue to manage, or try to manage, how others see us and what it is that they see  and in the process render ourselves even more unknowable to ourselves and to others.

If we are transparent, we are knowable, both by ourselves and others. It isn’t a matter of our actively disclosing information or being “accountable”. Instead, when we are transparent, we are knowable to others: What they know of us depends on their physical/spiritual/emotional/mental proximity to us, rather than strictly on our own actions.

And we become more knowable, we can better know ourselves.

More on this later. Thanks for reading.

A few weeks ago I read this post by Kathy Escobar. I found the post disturbing, and needed to take some time and reflect on both my reaction to it and what I truly wanted to say about it.

Kathy is the co-pastor of The Refuge. I don’t know much about this church, but I get the idea that they minister to a lot of “the least of these“: Folks who are  “high need”. From what she has described in her post, it sounds like the “high need” people may outnumber the “normals” at The Refuge.

Because of this skewed demographic, Kathy gets a lot of pats on the back (and probably the head) for her good work, but not so much in the way of practical support (i.e. people who are willing to become part of The Refuge’s community). Mind you, there are plenty of folks who are willing to send folks to The Refuge: They just don’t want to join them there.

When Kathy has asked folks why they don’t join the fellowship of The Refuge, she gets answers like these:

““we just want to be around less broken people”

“i don’t have the issues these people have”

“we just don’t feel comfortable” ”

I have alluded to my discomfort with the poor in previous posts. So when I read this post, I felt rather, um. . .challenged? I don’t live anywhere near The Refuge, so participating isn’t an option for me, but I still felt this need to justify why I wouldn’t participate if I was a local.

To my chagrin, my responses were identical to those listed by Kathy. In fact, I began feeling a bit helpless, thinking that if I were to become involved in a community such as Kathy’s, I’d probably implode with so many demands on my time, so many broken people wanting to be my friend, so many things and people that I’d have to “fix”. It was just too much, and I shrugged and said “Sorry God, I just couldn’t do all that.”

It was then that I heard the still, small voice say:  “Who asked you to?”

Stunned, I had to sit back and think. I realized that what was making me so uncomfortable about participating in a community like Kathy’s had less to do with what would like be expected of me by the church community, and more of what I was expecting of myself.

The arrogance of my thinking and the largeness of my ego actually got me to laugh harder at myself than I have for a very long time: Here I was thinking that if I were to join such a church, I would be expected to meet needs, solve problems, and make friends with needy people. Never mind that:

1. I have a fair number of needs myself right now, and not a lot of resources (personal, emotional, spiritual, or material) to share with others.

2. While I might think of myself as SuperLainie, the fact is that neither I, nor anyone else, can “solve” other people’s problems.

3. These “needy people” just might have their own friends. And maybe they wouldn’t like me all that much anyway.

In other words, I was willing to withhold my presence from a community where I likely would have been welcomed and loved, all because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to live up to my own (not the church’s, not the pastors’, not God’s) expectations about what I “needed to do for them”.

(Kind of silly, eh?)

While I was reading Kathy’s post, I got the sense that the only expectation that she had of others was a willingness to be present: For her, for the church leadership, and for the church community. Yet I had to admit that, if I were local to The Refuge, I would have been reluctant to offer that simple thing because of my “whole-r than thou” attitude.

Of course, I am not everybody, and others may have different reasons for not participating in The Refuge (or churches like it. But I’d encourage those who have the same “uncomfortable” reaction to consider why they feel so squeamish. Is it because they are truly afraid of not getting their own needs met? Or are they laboring under a heavy burden of unreasonable self-expectation?

And if the later is true, are they willing to surrender that burden for a lighter one?

(Am I?)

]]> http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/10/12/who-asked-you-to-the-arrogance-of-self-expectation/feed/ 0 http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/09/16/watching-daddy-die-september-synchroblog-on-maturity/ http://www.lainiepetersen.com/2008/09/16/watching-daddy-die-september-synchroblog-on-maturity/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:11:53 +0000 LainieP http://www.lainiepetersen.com/?p=294

My dad died thirteen years ago. I was privileged to be with him at the time of his death, although the circumstances were not what either of us would have chosen.  We met for lunch in downtown Chicago (not an unusual event) and after our meal he asked me if I wanted some dessert.

Then he died.

My memory of the event is disorganized, dissociative. I remember facing my father directly across the table as he died.  But this isn’t how it happened.  I know I was sitting off to his side. I know this because I remember turning to one of our dining companions and told her to call 911, even as another friend tended to my dad.

(A psychiatrist once told me that my psyche has deliberately scrambled this memory in order to protect me from further trauma. This makes sense. )

He died because his heart stopped.  He sat there, breathing, but his open eyes didn’t see me. The sudden, incomprehending fury of a toddler welled up in me: I needed my daddy, and he was there, but he wasn’t paying me any attention.

Then, as the reality of the situation began to take hold, as the baby-rage passed, denial took its place. I fell to my knees beside my chair, and hit my head, repeatedly, against it, in an attempt to wake up from what was surely a nightmare. Each time my head knocked into the arm of the chair, I experienced some relief, feeling myself “waking up” from this horror.

(Waking up from the horror, to the horror. No matter how hard I tried, I could not undream it.)

My mind left my body. I actually saw it go, irregular blotches of red and green and purple and yellow tethered  to my head by only a thin silver cord. I had the choice of going insane at that moment. I could have anesthetized myself against the pain by simply losing my mind. Or I could keep my sanity and suffer mightily.

(I chose the latter.)

I grabbed the silver cord. I yanked it hard, and the pieces of my mind returned to my head, though I grimly noted that they didn’t settle back in quite the same arrangement as before.

(This discombobulation was proven when I stood up and asked a busboy if he was a doctor.)

The restaurant managers had got my father onto the floor and administered CPR. My knowledge of human biology was scanty, but I concluded that if they were getting some blood to his brain, he might still hear me. I called out to him, again and again, telling him that I loved him. The restaurant hostess quickly hustled me away. I was causing a scene.

I sat in a large chair in the lobby and sipped from a glass of ice water. When the paramedics arrived, I calmly rose to meet them, informing them of my father’s medical history. From then on I was calm, cool, collected, and sane. Everyone was frantically trying to save my father’s life, but I had seen it leave his eyes. I was resigned. (Though, at the hospital, when the ER doctor gave me the “we did all we could” speech, I still almost fainted.)

Later that day, as family and friends gathered, my godfather embraced me and said the strangest thing: “Now’s the time for growing up.”.  I didn’t get it. I was living and working independently . I was twenty-six years old. What more “growing up” did I have to do?

(A lot, as it turned out, and I sure as hell didn’t do a very good job of it.)

As time passed,  I began to heal and to be able to function. But it was a struggle. Despite my putting the worst of the grief behind me, I still desperately needed to find a reason for what had happened. My compartmentalized, orderly world had crashed around me. I had long believed that purpose and order could only be explained by the existence of God. But what purpose and order was there in what had happened to my father and myself? Where was God? What was God?

Since my own, personal, world had fallen into chaos and meaninglessness, I began groping blindly to regain order and purpose (never mind God).  I spent over a decade in this quest, looking for “signs” and systems and people that might bestow my life and soul with  meaning and purpose. I had a more than a few triumphs and joys, but mostly I failed miserably.

This quote, attributed to James Hillman, perhaps best describes my condition:

“He who has lost his soul will be finding God anywhere, up above and down below, in here and out there, he will cling to every straw of love blown past his doorway as he stands waiting for a sign.”

This went on for years.

To an extent, it continues.

I know now that the mark of an adult is graciously accepting (you don’t have to like it) the fact that things are not the way we think they ought to be.  It is the understanding (again, you don’t have to like it) that one’s own agenda has no real significance in the greater scheme of things.  It is no longer demanding that reality (you still don’t have to like it) serve one’s personal desires.

When my father died, I first raged against him for not being where I needed him to be. Then I turned my rage both outward (onto God and just about everything else) as well as inward (onto myself for not being able to offer myself the kind of control necessary to make sense of my existence). None of this served any good purpose. None of it made any difference in what was real. None of it made my life easier or happier. Instead of giving my life purpose and order, my childish groping kept me in chaos: I didn’t like it, but (I thought) it was easier to be there than to be an adult.

Then was the time for growing up.

Now is the time for growing up.

Its been time for growing up for quite some time now.

Maybe I’m finally ready.

This post is part of the September Syncroblog on maturity. Check out the posts listed below for other takes on this month’s topic!

Phil Wyman at Square No More with “Is Maturity Really What I Want?”
Lainie Petersen at Headspace with “Watching Daddy Die”
Kathy Escobar at The Carnival in My Head with “what’s inside the bunny?”
John Smulo at JohnSmulo.com
Erin Word at Decompressing Faith with “Long-Wearing Nail Polish and Other Stories”
Beth Patterson at The Virtual Teahouse with “the future is ours to see: crumbling like a mountain”
Bryan Riley at Charis Shalom with “Still Complaining?”
Alan Knox at The Assembling of the Church with “Maturity and Education”
KW Leslie at The Evening of Kent with “Putting spiritual infants in charge”
Bethany Stedman at Coffee Klatch with “Moving Towards True Being: The Long Process of Maturity”
Adam Gonnerman at Igneous Quill with “Old Enough to Follow Christ?”
Joe Miller at More Than Cake with “Intentional Relationships for Maturity”
Jonathan Brink at JonathanBrink.com with “I Won’t Sin”
Susan Barnes at A Booklook with “Growing Up”
Tracy Simmons at The Best Parts with “Knowing Him Who is From the Beginning”
Joseph Speranzella at A Tic in the Mind’s Eye with “Spiritual Maturity And The Examination of Conscience”
Sally Coleman at Eternal Echoes with “vulnerable maturity”
Liz Dyer at Grace Rules with “What I Wish The Church Knew About Spiritual Maturity”
Cobus van Wyngaard at My Contemplations with “post-enlightenment Christians in an unenlightened South Africa”
Steve Hayes at Khanya with “Adult Content”
Ryan Peter at Ryan Peter Blogs and Stuff with “The Foundation For Ministry and Leading”
Kai Schraml at Kaiblogy with “Mature Virtue”
Nic Paton at Sound and Silence with “Inclusion and maturity”
Lew Ayotte at The Pursuit with “Maturity and Preaching“

So where was I?

Ah yes.  In my last post I expressed dismay at the way that my own posts, as well as some discussions on other blogs, were treating the issue of transparency. It seemed to me that we were going ’round in circles, with a lot of hand wringing and caveats and personal opinions getting in the way of coming to any conclusions.

My primary problems with the way that “transparency” is being discussed are:

1. We seem to be equating “transparency” with “being honest when we screw-up”. Now this sort of honesty may well be a fruit of transparency, but it isn’t all that transparency entails.

2. We also seem to be confusing personal transparency with the sort of transparency that we expect from politicians and/or business leaders in their professional dealings/practices.  Again, I’d like to think that professional/political transparency is often the fruit of one’s personal transparency, but I would argue that being transparent in one’s fiscal processes (for example) is different than being personally transparent.

I think that we need to recognize the difference between transparency as a way of being vs transparency as a description of a set of behaviors. As long as we define transparency as something that we do, rather than something that we are, we are going to run into roadblocks, exceptions, and quandries.

More on this over the next few days. If you want to read what some other bloggers have had to say, visit:

KW Leslie’s Baring the Secrets of the Soul

John Smulo’s Wanna Play Peek-a-Boo?

Sally Coleman’s Just as I am. . .reflections on transparency

I am concerned that we may not have very good working definition of “transparency”, and that, as a result, we (not Sally, John and myself, but anyone who has an interest in this discussion) may be talking past each other.

So I am going to think about this some more and then try and write some stuff on what I think transparency is and isn’t.  Depending on what I come up with, I may even end up revising my other posts on this topic.

Peace out.

As I discussed in yesterday’s post, transparency is tricky. While it is often demanded, particularly in the church, there is little in the way of support for those who are transparent. Transparency often means that truth results in consequences, and those consequences are often not good.

Still, we need to keep trying to be transparent, even as we evaluate how we ought to go about self-disclosure.  Here are some ideas on how to accomplish appropriate transparency:

1. Consider the Scope of Your Transparency

My mother once gave me some very wise advice. She told me that if I was ever in a social situation and I belched (or worse), that I should say “excuse me”, but only as loud as the belch itself. In other words, be polite to those who heard you, but don’t announce the event to those who weren’t even aware of it.

We need to make sure that our transparency is appropriate: Broadcasting a personal failing that only affected a few people is not only unnecessary, but it can also be a twisted form of self-aggrandizement.

2. Consider that Once the News is “Out” People Likely Won’t Care About it After a Few Months (or Even Weeks!)

When I was 18 (and quite unmarried) I got pregnant and decided to carry the pregnancy to term. When my best attempts to keep my condition failed, I was constantly worried that people were always “talking about me”.  While I know that my family and social network likely engaged in an initial flurry of gleeful gossip, that all died down rather quickly.

(In fact, I was told point-blank by my parents and some older friends that I was NOT a topic of conversation, or was I at the forefront of everyone’s mind!)

Because humans are mostly self-centered, we are convinced that everyone is always thinking about us, for good or for bad. But the truth is that most people are far more concerned about themselves than they are other people.  We need to keep perspective about transparency: Yes, we risk being gossiped about and ostracized (in some cases), but a new “flavor of the week” is just around the corner. Trust me.

3. Being Transparent is not Equivalent to Putting on a “Kick-Me” Sign (i.e. You aren’t obligated to take abuse.)

Being transparent is just that: Letting other people know about the challenges, struggles, and yes, the good things in your life.  When we are transparent about difficulties (or even outright screw-ups), we are doing so in order to be honest and to prevent more misunderstandings and misdeeds from occurring.  We are asking for help and support from others in our struggles.  What we are not asking for (nor do we deserve) is “punishment” in the form of ongoing admonitions, nasty remarks, and inappropriate intrusions into our personal lives.

For Christians, being transparent ought to be the fruit of grace, rather than the means by which we try to achieve it. When we are transparent, need to remember that while we may still be working through our guilt, nobody ought to be adding to it. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you “deserve” the condemnation and abuse of a busybody just because you did something wrong.

4. Giving an Accounting: To Whom are You Accountable?

This is a sticky concept, but I am going to give it a whirl. I think that sometimes we overestimate just who we are accountable to.  Public figures have an even more difficult time with this, because they have such a large sphere of influence.

But I think it is an important question to consider when we are talking about transparency.  Do we really owe someone who reads our blog occasionally the same level of transparency that we offer our spouse? Our children? Our pastor? Our employees?

Determining accountability is a crucial step in appropriate transparency. It is also probably best addressed in another blog post.

5. Being Transparent When You Can’t Be

There are times when “being transparent” steps on the toes of others. If our being transparent is going to incriminate or endanger another person, is against the advice of an attorney (i.e. a legal case is pending), or is going to cause humiliation for innocent/not-so-innocent bystanders, we need to shut up, step back, and think about how we are going to deal with the situation.

One way of coping with a situation like this is to consider point #4 and figure out who we are accountable to.  If we are able to be transparent with our “inner ring” of accountability, we not only are able to get the support that we need, but we have demonstrated, against any future insinuation, that we were appropriately accountable and transparent.

The other option, which I am not a fan of because it can cause more problems than it solves, is to be partially transparent: You can tell people that there is an issue, and that you have been taking steps to deal with it but that you are unable to reveal what it is. The trouble is that this approach will get people curious, gossiping, and perhaps some in the “investigative path”.  On the other hand, it may be an option under circumstances where you believe that the “truth will come out” eventually, and you want to prepare people for the eventual revelations.

For Tomorrow:  How We Can Support Transparency