Do We Search for the Truth?

Do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Do we even take the time to consider a question like that out of the long-held assumption that we are, in fact, looking for the truth because (we assume) that that’s the obvious thing to do? What insanity would behoove us to do anything less? But do we search for the truth, or do we search for ways around the truth? Maybe we should consider the fact that there are a whole lot of reasons why we actually might stoop to something less.

Truth be told, the truth may not be what we want it to be. It may not support our agendas, or our desires. In fact, it might actually render those things as erroneous and all-together ill-fated. The truth may not support all of the things that we passionately wish to believe, or have talked ourselves into believing. Or truth may dare to go so far as to actually call the entirety of those beliefs into question, and call us out for believing in them in the first place. Do we search for the truth even when it takes the foundations that we’ve laboriously built with the sweat of our brow and the best of our years, and does truth handily expose those foundations as weak, entirely misappropriated, and as nothing more than sand piled in every place except the right place? Will we search for truth even when it looks us square in the face and tells us this kind of stuff? Will we search for it knowing that there is a very distinct possibility that it will tell us everything that we don’t want to hear in every way that we don’t want to hear it? Will we search for truth even then?

I don’t know that we do. In fact, what we seem to search for the most are ways to circumvent the truth. Our search does not seem to be ‘for’ the truth, but rather it seems to be far more vested in ways to get ‘around’ the truth. We would not even begin to label our actions as such because such actions would immediately call the whole of our character into question. But what we label something does not make it what we’ve labeled it. Our search seems to be one of committed avoidance. It is one of intentional evasion, of manufactured detours, of clever deviations that are so slick that we don’t even realize that we deviated. It’s not that we run from the truth as much as we diligently work to create pathways around it, that in the end, never get us around anything. I wonder if that’s really more of what we do.

And as such, these evasive endeavors are quite naturally filled with such familiar things as slippery denials, evasive rationalizations, ambiguous justifications, relentless blame-placing, rogue fear-mongering, the incessant spinning of events, the bogus editing of facts, and the mind-boggling contortions where we take reality and make it something other than reality.

But likely the most dangerous of these is the self-endowed liberty that we have granted ourselves to make truth whatever we wish to make it. Therefore, it’s not about avoidance, because conveniently, that’s no longer necessary. Rather, it’s about creating, which is avoidance of the most calculated, but ill-fated sort. It’s about making truth whatever we want it to be. It’s about making it fit whatever agenda, or belief system, or value system, or platform, or whatever it is that we want it to fit. If truth will not grant us that which we wish, we will simply edit it until it does. But in the end, it is no longer truth, and truth be told, we will eventually find that out, and we’ll probably find it out the hard way.

Truth. Do we search for it, or do we do something else with it? You might ask yourself, in a truthful kind of way, what you’re doing with it.

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

• Jesus Christ

Thinking It's Over When It's Not

It’s over…we tell ourselves. It’s over. Whatever it might be (or might have been) it’s gone and there’s no getting it back. The loss is too big. The obstacles are too daunting. Things have changed so much that whatever we lost no longer has a place in the current reality that we’re living in. We’re one person (just one person) trapped in a downward spiral that’s far more powerful than all of us put together. The glass isn’t half empty. The fact is, there is no glass. We can’t pick up where we left off because where we left off...left. It’s over…so we think.

In processing all of this for myself, I wrote this quote:

“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”

Sometimes things are ‘over’ only because we believe them to be over. We’ve been told that they’re over. Or everyone around us says that they’re over. Or the cultural climate seems to say that they’re over. Or those without vision have never realized that they lost anything because they never saw what they had in the first place, so they tell us that nothing’s over because nothing was lost to begin with. Or people have chosen to believe that they’re over because that’s easier than hoping that they’re not. We don’t want to look the fool and try to save something that’s no longer there to save, so we tell ourselves and those around us that it’s over…so we think. But we can sail again.

Is something really over? Have we actually lost something that we can’t reclaim? Is it gone forever? Or, is that what we’ve chosen to believe. It’s my sense that most things aren’t over (at all). Rather, it’s our belief that they are (which is a ‘belief,’ but not necessarily a ‘reality’). It’s more our attitude, or our fears, or our unwillingness to challenge popular thinking, or our unwillingness to risk grabbing hold of a vision, or a lack of belief in ourselves, or more importantly, a lack of belief in God. In the Bible, Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Do you get that? Do you understand what that opens up? Do you understand that our perception that something is over does not take into account that with God, nothing is over? That our families, our communities, our dreams, our relationships, our nation can sail again? That there are always possibilities, even when all we see are massive impossibilities? That what we feel we have to walk away from are things that have a ton of possibilities still living and breathing within them? Is something really over? Really? You might want to think about that because you’d be amazed at all of the things that can sail again.

Additional Resources

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Welcome to Day Eight of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”

Today’s Theme is “The Painful Struggle of Infertility.”

The quote for today reads this way:

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten— the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm— my great army that I sent among you..”

• Joel 2:25

What many people are desperate to have are the very things that others recklessly throw away. What is cherished, intimately longed for, and desperately sought after by so many is discarded by others without so much as a fleeting thought.

Such is the agonizing dilemma of those facing the pain of infertility. Having squarely set decades of dreams on the immense privilege of having a child, couples find their dreams brought to a jarring and often unexpected halt. Facing the brutal possibility of being childless, these couples expend massive amounts of time, emotional energy, and personal resources to salvage a dream that seems to slip further away with every attempt to save it.

Wildly gyrating emotions spin off sporadic thoughts of physical or personal inadequacy. We wonder if this is punishment for some perceived offense that is only now being executed on our passion to hold a child. Thoughts of injustice as held against the reality that life is unjust. An uninvited jealousy of other couples who were able to bear children that runs head-long against the very real joy that we have for them. And then, the brutal thought of those who recklessly abort the very thing that we would give the entirety our lives to hold. The turmoil is unspeakable. The pain unfathomable.

Life robs us in many ways. But God enriches us in every way. What the world takes, God will restore. We will never lose anything that God cannot and will not give back to us many times over. The shape and form of what He gives may not resemble what we lost, but it will provide the healing that we need. The truth of these statements will never and can never be offset by the depth, intensity, size, or pain of any loss…ever.

Prayer

Dear God:

I know that life is full of loss. It’s all around me and it’s everywhere within me. In this world, we can’t get away from it. I know that because I’ve done my level best to do exactly that. And despite those efforts, it seems like some sort of loss is always lying in wait just around the corner of every dream that I’ve ever had.

But Lord, sometimes the losses are so big, so deep, so life-altering, so unjust, so seemingly impossible to live with…so everything that they should not be that I have a hard time accepting them. The inability to conceive a child is one of those. I’m way too human and way too fragile to take the really brutal losses and somehow find a safe or reasonable place for them despite how much I want to do that.

You know life can be brutal. You’re no stranger to any of that. You lived it. You endured it. You knew it was coming for You from the beginning of creation. You stepped into this world knowing that it was staring You in the face.

But knowing that kind of brutality, You said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Dear God, fill the hole left by the hope of a child. I don’t want to play the victim; I want to be the victor. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life pouting; I want to live my days prevailing. I want to rest on the fact that nothing can be taken from me that You cannot replace many times over in whatever way You decide to do that. I desperately want to live with that reality, with that hope, and with that peace.

I pray all of this in Jesus’s Name. Amen.

A Thought to Carry With Me Today

“If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.”

Thanks for joining us today on this thirty-day devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.” You will find “Taking It to Our Knees” on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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Have a great day!