I Am Very Much Still On The Journey To Truth

​One of the most dangerous places I've ever lived in was truth.

MY truth.

It limited the people I was willing to hang out with. It made me very judgmental of the people I didn't hang out with. It made me dangerously more certain than curious.

When you are not curious about the world, the world and the people in it become frighteningly small. You can become frighteningly isolated.

Mark Anderson says, "Whatever our beliefs, we still have much more truth to discover, and people we disagree very strongly with may well teach us some of it."

The people I am most apt to refuse to hang out with these days are the people who want to sell their beliefs as my truths. I say that with great grace, for I used to be one of those people. One of those people who thought my truths were THE truth, and therefore were the truths everyone should abide by.

But the truth about my TRUTHS from those days: I no longer consider many of those truths true at all.

Today I believe I am on a journey to truth. One of the quickest ways for me to sabotage that journey is to believe I am already there. And the world knows that, which is why the world can so easily become my enemy.

The world that will flood my newsfeed today with soundbites and bits that it wants me to embrace as truth. As THE truth. It will offer me carefully curated truths built on my own written words and my own media viewing habits and my own interpersonal conversations - because here is a truth I do know; the world DOES today know all those things. We are beyond pretending it doesn't.

So why does the world do this?

Because the moment I believe I have found THE truth, that's the moment I stop looking for it. And that's the moment your truths become something to attack and not something to consider. That's the moment I come to associate who you are with what you believe, and to the degree what you believe doesn't look like my truths, well that's the degree to which you become expendable in my life.

And I do believe there is an evil force in this world that wants us all to see each other as expendable. I don't know if that is THE truth, but I sure see the truths of it playing out with greater frequency these days.

The closest thing I have to a THE truth in my life these days is God. But I will be the first to admit that I know only a hint of that God compared to what I will one day know of him. If there is any subject I yet have much to learn about it is my God.

My truth.

For my greatest truth in life - God - is still filled with so much uncertainty. My God still fuels my heart with a desire to learn much more than he does a desire to impose. Whenever I forget that, I drift back toward MY truth instead of his.

One thing that stands out to me in reading about and learning about my God, he was not threatened by those who held tight to truths that were not his. In fact, those were the people he hung out with most often.

He touched their leper skin when others wouldn’t come near.

He let a bleeding woman reach out for his robe instead of pushing her away.

He placed mud on the blind man’s eyes and gave him sight.

He knelt in the dirt beside a woman caught in adultery while everyone else clutched stones.

He sat at a well with a Samaritan woman who held her own broken truths about love and belonging.

He called a greedy tax collector down from a tree and then went to his house for a meal.

He let children climb into his lap when the disciples tried to send them away.

He washed the dirty feet of disciples who still didn’t understand him.

He spoke peace to a criminal hanging beside him on a cross.

My God never let anyone else's truth stand in the way of him living out his greatest truth: love.

I think maybe that was for a reason. Maybe God knew that one day we'd become so obsessed with truth that we'd lose sight of the power of simply showing up in love. Maybe God knew our journeys to the beauty found in the ultimate truth would be so sabotaged - so utterly destroyed - by our own truths, that we'd be left wondering what is the path forward from here.

I believe we are perilously near there - to this place of where do we go from here.

Maybe God wanted to remind us that truth is love, and that love looks like everyone. Our personal truths are too often used to screen out the 'unlovable' - God's life on earth demonstrated his truth is there is no such thing.

I didn't always believe that - that there was no such thing as unlovable.

But if I'm honest, that was back when I thought I knew the truth.