Accountability can be so painful. There's the pain of bearing your soul to another and sharing the dark places in your life. Yes, that’s painful, but in a healing and good way. But there's also the bearing of one’s soul and then the tearing and ripping of said soul by the “faithful” listener on the other end. With both things a possibility, should we keep on holding one another accountable or not?

Since I never know which image the word can conjure up, accountability is a word I've come to shy away from using much. Then I came across a small book called The Handbook for Churches and Mission Groups by Dorothy Devers and N. Gordon Crosby. Sounds like a boring read. Sounds like something on shouldn't read. Seriously, who reads a handbook cover to cover? But this one has so many nuggets of wisdom buried inside that it's worth a perusal. 

In the section on accountability, which is a must for their groups, there is the admonition that if accountability is left out the members will start to become lazy with their spiritual disciplines (duh), and then without accountability, they will become discouraged in the grouop (what?). Accountability seems so often to equal discouragement, not the other way around. 

That one idea left my mind spinning back to times of personal discouragement because of "accountability." Times of being confronted on my sins and made to feel small for my lack of awareness. We've all been there. I even knew of a group that paid "penance" by running stairs when they didn't get their daily devotional in. Within a few months, that group was at each other's throats. Discouragement seems to abound in the face of this kind of accountability. 

So what, pray tell,  did Ms. Devers and Mr. Crosby think they were talking about? Well, they were talking about accountability within the realm of spiritual direction. Spritual direction is something we as Christians have lost or never even heard of, but listen to Merton's explanation: a spiritual director is "...a trusted friend who, in an atomosphere of sympathetic understanding, helps and strengthens us in our groping efforts to correspond with the grace of the Holy Spirit, who alone is the true Director in the fullest sense of the word." 

When I think of being accountable to someone like that, well, accountability never sounded so good. When I think about being someone like that, well, the accountability bar was never set so high. And, when I think of the word accountability now, I see how without it discouragement sets in and with it a life can soar.

Let's all then take on our cloak of directing others, rather than jamming them into what we think would make their lives better, and hold each other accountable with the grace and compassion our God has held us with. And let's take accountability off the dirty word list once and for all.