The Truth Matters
The last week has been hard. First there was the genocide thing. Then came the blasphemy thing. The audacious display of narcissism sent me into a spiral and I succumbed the lies that of those who declared that I am worth less. Who am I to think anyone would listen to me?
Then I came across a Substack that someone wrote a few months ago and it was exactly what I needed. Toward the end, the author wrote: “I still believe telling the truth matters, even when it doesn’t seem to change anything. Maybe especially then.”
The truth matters, while narcissism thrives on lies, the truth sets us free.
Over the last ten years, we’ve all been in an abusive relationship. Some people, people we know and love, chose this for the world and we are all suffering the consequences.
We have been gaslit, threatened, and had our boundaries broken. We have watched as our loved ones have fallen for the guilt trips, get isolated, and love bombed.
This is abuse.
No matter how violent he gets, they will not leave him. It’s easy to see them all as accomplices, but many are victims; they think he loves them, because someone told them this is what love is.
We have to keep telling the truth about what love really looks like. Love does not store up treasures, it feeds the hungry. Love does not cut medical care, it heals the sick. Love does not arbitrarily deport, it welcomes the stranger. Love does not lock people in cages, it sets the prisoners free. Love does not kill its enemies, it lays down its life.
There are many truths that must be told. We may not change anyone else’s mind, but we must keep our minds free and living in the truth.
Sometimes we have to speak the truth into the universe and trust that it will be exactly what someone needs to hear, whenever they happen to find it - whether it takes a few minutes or two thousand years.
“Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’s sake. For it is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed, always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us but life in you.
But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—“I believed, and so I spoke”—we also believe, and therefore we also speak, because we know that the one who raised Jesus will also raise us with Jesus and will present us with you in his presence. Indeed, everything is for your sake, so that grace, when it has extended to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.
- 1 Corinthians 4:1-18 NRSVue