Truth is not enough

As an avid reader and occasional writer, I know that words without context are incomprehensible. Words without context are the ones most often confused and misinterpreted. “Shoot them” makes one kind of sense with a doctor providing medicine shots to a group of people with the same medical need, another to an assassin being encouraged by a partner, and another by someone being told to protect innocents from a murderous attack by terrorists. There are so many contexts that will completely change the meaning and intent of that phrase.

I listen for context when people speak to me about their faith. Are they talking about the God they know personally or only know about. People who know about God can be the cruelest people because they are full of truth that has no love, compassion, and forgiveness. Justice without compassion is abusive. I’ve been hurt by persons who were wrong and others who were right. The context made all the difference with both.

One person cruelly created a disaster in my life that took years to overcome and still has an impact today. However, I later realized that he was doing the best he could with the partial information he had and was intending to help, not harm. His intention was only experienced long after the injury when I learned about what happened, why, and how. I began to heal when I was able to forgive him. My forgiveness did not make his mistake less so. It created a context within which God could work to bring restoration and redemption. The facts without forgiveness would have never made room for healing.

The Ten Commandments are the most powerful rules for teaching right from wrong. They provide a guideline for excellent laws: love God, be accountable and responsible, and care for others. They show a standard of my rights should not keep you from having your rights. Yet, without love, compassion, and forgiveness, these laws can create the worst kind of brutality when people hold others to standards that no one can keep perfectly. Knowledge without the interaction and relationship with a living God can be horrific. Only God, who is superior to His creation, is the only one who can mediate and create the correct context for truth. Men speaking for God often can not. Listen for the truth, and the context. Listen for God.

I love the story of Cinderella. She was always a wonderful person in the story, only her circumstances changed. Life was good when her dad was alive, bad when he died, and fabulous when she was discovered by the prince. You might see a parallel in a Christian’s timeline. Good while small and under someone’s protection, bad when we are on our own and our own values and strengths, and fabulous when discovered or discover, the Prince of Peace. I know it is way too general, but there can be some commonality.

I imagined a Cinderella comparison in my life. I saw the negativity in me, yet many of my former students have said nice things to me and about me, and I’ve been called a “favorite” teacher by many I’ve come across. Some have even made an extra effort to contact me through social media and other methods. So where is the real me? The guy I often see in the mirror or the teacher students generously accepted? I compare this to either a person sticking his head in a pumpkin by trying to be a good person in his own awareness and strength or the person riding in a wonderful carriage made from a pumpkin. The difference in the story is a fairy godmother. The difference in my life is Jesus. He creates the beautiful carriage I get to ride in, which is so much better than me sticking my head in a pumpkin.

Without Jesus there is no carriage or values that would create a lovable, respectable person. Love and the qualities of God (called the fruits of the Spirit in the Bible) are a manifestation of God wherever they are found, even when found among persons who reject God and intentionally fight against Him. Love can’t exist if God is not somehow present in some way.

The joy of Christianity is that Christians know who provides the true qualities of joy and beauty and can connect with the author of life. God created the pumpkin carriage through His constant work to grow me past my total commitment to selfishness. He added His generosity to show me grace when I was unable to be what He and I prefer me to be. I rode in a carriage pumpkin instead of wearing a pumpkin with my head shoved in it because God gave better than I had to offer while He was (and is) still working on my transformation to better.

The desert sands are the dry tears of the earth, the deep tears too precious to share, the pain beyond expression. Yet, there is beauty and life in that most desperate climate and ecology. The plants that grow there are all the more precious because of the rarity and hardship in their life requirement. How beautiful must be the fruit birthed in the suffering of a person that arrives in the climate of their utmost pain.

Compassion often arrives to a suffering soul through the life of one who has likewise suffered. It is the offered arm of one who, without judgment, wants to lift up and strengthen his fellow. It is the warriors bond of, “We can stand as we support each other and continue the fight.” It is a love that goes over, under, or around the walls of judgement that separates people from each other. It is the care that sacrifices itself for the genuine need of the other. It is the quality that marks the work and/or presence of God in us by not having ourselves as its center or key component. It is a beauty beyond most or all others despite its circumstance. It is the desert flower both vulnerable and enduring, strength bonded to weakness. It is the quality that the story tellers hunt for in the history of people and their survival in the tumult of life.

I would that I could be an oasis for others who travel the desert places I sometimes inhabit. I would hope to provide a drink of water during a time of their dryness and a place of shade for rest in the heat of the journey. I hope that my time in the desert would provide a respite for them as has been provided for me by those who put themselves aside for my benefit and need. The Israelites wandered in tents, from well to well or water source to water source, through the dry and sometimes harsh environments of their trail. A perfect image of our wandering process of growth development through the often inhospitable circumstances of this temporary world. Yet, like the desert, we have opportunities to see and taste the beauty of that which is to come when the deserts are no more.

All people are creatures of faith because without faith we are unable to move from where we are into any next place or idea. Faith is the belief structure upon which we rely to operate our lives and function. Our culture teaches the currently popular ideas and procedures until it changes. Culture changes by the faith of people who change it for good or bad. Where it was once normal to see a large portion of our population in slavery and treat them as subservient, now, thank heaven, it is not. People operated in the culture they knew then as we do now using the trends as the faith stepping stones to operate from here to there, even as faith pushed change in the culture. Culture is a path of belief, of knowledge-to-date, of tradition, and of current values.

There are trends within trends. Some areas of human activity are more likely to suppress religious faith and express faith in non-religious ideologies than other areas. I find it curious that the need to control, be self sufficient, and serve self-oriented values appear to be evident in the non-religious trend, while values superior to man’s needs or control appear more prevalent in the religious trend. In these things I look at general patterns instead of specifics because there always cross-overs in every trend of culture and faith structure whether in God or without God.

I wonder why anti-God would serve in some areas rather than others? People who are passionate about their wealth tend toward anti-God and more self. Yet, people who love God might well create the healthy, compassionate work places that are actually more productive and successful in producing than the wealth builders create. Reading a book on personnel management showed me that without mentioning God, studies verified that the values of God work well and better in the workplace than the common practice of criticism, and other popular misbehaviors and oppressions. Praise, appreciation, compliments, and affirmation that are critically absent in the work force, or at least in most of the jobs I’ve every worked, including thirty-three years in the public school system, are opposite to the values taught in scripture. They are also opposite to the needs of the people involved in the business, both management and employee. I wonder why the contrary patterns are chosen over the healthy and life giving ones.

A person might ask me why I believe in Jesus. One of my answers is because I continually see individuals, including and especially myself, working against or in ways contrary to their own best benefit as proof of the Bible. The Bible tells us that all men sin. I see it and believe it. It also says that all men need salvation. I also agree and see. The only one who can rescue is He who is outside the destruction or pattern of destruction. Jesus is the one.

I am a failed atheist because I began to think/realize I didn’t have sufficient faith.

I was a committed atheist for a while in my life. I was impressed with all the appearance of logic and facts. I bought the image of Christianity being like a great myth and emotional safe place for people to hide. I was even able to beat up some beginning Christians with my logic and reasoning as it was at the time, a fact that now grieves me because of the harm I caused in my arrogant ignorance.

I began to realize that atheism is its own faith. It requires a perspective that overcomes logic and fact gaps with an unwillingness to listen as well as speak. To really be logical is to hear without prejudice in an effort to examine all possibilities in their own contextual integrity. That wasn’t available in the atheist point of view or in the ability of insecure Christians. Truth must be able to stand on its own strength regardless of the people or their perspective or their need to make themselves feel good or secure. I, in my examination, have to recognize my own limitations in being part of the system of life that I’m examining. This point of humility is not common due to the creature need to assert its own value.

I spoke to an avowed atheist and asked him to explain the foundations of his faith. The more he talked, the more he evangelized me toward my own faith. I could not understand, based on his own comments, how he didn’t immediately realize that he was justifying a divine creator. The shortest, and probably inadequate, way to abbreviate his statements was to say he explained a well ordered universe, which is beautifully knit together in sustainable systems, being created as a product of complete randomness. I asked him to define random because he was obviously seeing something I didn’t. His reason for atheism requires more faith than I can muster. I was equally challenged by other reasonings and explanations he provided about science versus Christianity which I do not see as oppositional.

This brings up science. So much of atheism seems to say that science disproves Christianity. My perspective is that science proves Christianity. The only fight is the perspective of the talker. A person who does not believe sees his facts as proof God doesn’t exist. A believer easily sees science as proving God and the creation. Either way, it takes faith. The advantage I feel I have is that, as God is alive, He is able to speak for Himself and verify Himself to each new generation. The debate requires two people in the limits of their understanding to argue their perspectives with the facts they know. A living God who interacts with His creation is a verification that makes being a Christian the easier faith. I don’t have to know everything to know Him. The atheist is sort of his own god because he does not believe in another. He can only speak to himself and respond to his own thoughts. A Christian can speak in prayer to a living God and expect a response that is not of his own making.

There is so much I don’t understand and moments when understanding comes easy. Marriage is a constant education for me.

I didn’t need to understand when we became engaged and married. I knew I loved her. I believed she loved me. We had a relationship. We began our timeline of life together with more ignorance that we could imagine until later. Later, we had learned more and realized how little we knew in the beginning. Each stage of the timeline was much the same. We saw how much we didn’t know and how much we had learned, and how much was left to learn. One thing was and is consistent throughout the journey, the relationship.

Our commitment, our relationship, carries through the ups and downs, the known and unknown, the confusion and the order. It provides a strength and unity when it should not exist. It provides a bubble of hope with the simple holding of hands in times of uncertainty. It creates a stability within instability and a reference point when no map coordinates are available. There is a world in our life together that is like its own planet that has all the complexity within and without which can never completely be grasp. Yet it works. It continues. It is a seed that creates a plant that grows creating limbs that stretches itself into its environment shaping the air like a sculpture and interacts with all other life. A marriage is a created thing that becomes its own life, a living connection, that builds and grows. It is often described, yet beyond complete description. It is a miracle.

Marriage requires humility because without humility, it is impossible to love. The marriage constantly pressures the partners to put themselves aside for the other, creating a joy that defies logic to people who prefer “me first.” It is the joy you find when you are not the most important. It is the completeness you experience when you are not trying to complete yourself but someone else. It is a you first mentality that defies the common preference of humanity. It is the truth that defies common knowledge.

Marriage is also one of the most common example of the relationship that God wants with people. It is a relationship that lives among all the gaps of understanding with a kind of confidence and strength. It is a sharing and communication that can live a healthy life despite the leaks and potential wounds of broken or shattered pottery. It is a joy beyond understanding and a connection that grows and produces life through all challenges and all victories. It is an eternal miracle. It is life and life giving.