3 Ways to Avoid the Truth Dilemma
It’s Election Day! Wow, what an intense few months we’ve had leading up to this day. I hope you’re exercising your right to vote today if you haven’t already. As I consider the deep division in our country and churches, this has been on my mind…
Recently I was away for the weekend and spoke to an extremely accomplished, thoughtful woman who reminded me that with every online click, information is honed and narrowed—perfectly suited to you. Your current beliefs about, well, anything - career, culture, hobbies, passions. Everything coming at you online is highly tailored to reinforce where and who you are.
Our echo-chambers are getting more strongly reinforced.
So, when we listen (oh, if we could just listen) to another view unlike our own, we really do think, “What planet are you from? ‘Cause how on earth could you think/believe that?”
Well you can see how. We really are living in our own little, self-made worlds. And often we don’t even know it. By now you probably realize we were discussing the HOT documentary, The Social Dilemma.
I gazed at concerned faces around the table where we sat outside amidst changing colors of fall foliage and leaves, until someone said, “I don’t even know what news to watch or read anymore. It’s just all so slanted. How can we break out? Where can we get the truth?”
Well, it’s not on FOX News, honey. It’s not on CNN, baby.
These outrageously charged political times may have you smugly thinking you have a monopoly on truth. Respectfully, you really don’t. Not the Republicans. Not the Democrats. We’re all caught in the middle of a dilemma. Neither you nor I hold the monopoly on full and complete truth. God alone holds that. And have confidence in this: in the final analysis, truth will always stand. In the meantime—and particularly today during the election and the tense days to follow—here are three ways to avoid the truth dilemma:
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Stay open. Listen to wise people whose views differ from your own.
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Pray and ask God to reveal truth.
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Stay close to the One who holds absolute truth, who not only speaks and disseminates truth, but in fact self-identifies as Truth. Jesus. I don’t know another being on the planet who made such an audacious claim. Read the gospels again. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s accounts of Jesus will help ground you again.
Thomas said to him, ”Lord,…how can we know the way?”
Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth and the life…” ( John 14:6).
These days, I’m in desperate need of these things. How ‘bout you?