It isn’t that we can’t handle the truth, we just don’t want it …

A lot of people believe the idea that everyone is searching for the truth.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Oh, how different this world would be if only we all really wanted to discover truth!

Our problem isn’t that we can’t handle the truth, it’s that many of us don’t want to know it. We make a decision about what we WANT to believe — often times even knowing that such a belief does NOT square with the truth — but we choose to believe what we WANT to believe.

I’ve seen it many times in counseling sessions with people who have thoroughly ruined their lives and who had walked to the precipice of truth about their choices and how they need to change, and then watch them purposely choose to forego the truth regardless of the horrendous consequences.

Our lives, our marriages, our relationships, our families, our churches, our ministries could blossom and thrive far more than they do if only we looked — if but for a moment — beyond our self-imposed choices of what we WANT to believe and entertain the idea that there really may be better answers, better opportunities, better methods, better ideas than the ones we have thus far insisted on settling for. Brad Shockley tells how his life was impacted when he was open to hearing the truth about his own self that he was completely unaware of …

His name was Toby. He had long hair. He wore boots and raced motorcycles. He was the coolest kid in my school. I didn’t have long hair, or wear boots, or ride motorcycles. I wasn’t the coolest kid, not by a long shot, so we were acquaintances, not friends. But one Saturday afternoon fate brought us together for a moment, and it taught me something I’ve never forgotten.

The football field was one of the few places in the small town I grew up in you could go when bored. I was kicking rocks across the cement bleachers when Toby pulled up on his bike (not a motorcycle, but even his regular bike was amazing; it was yellow and had shocks). We started talking and goofing off like boys do, if only for a little while. Our kinds were not supposed to mix, the cool and the uncool. It went against the order of things, like a mathlete dating a cheerleader.

Toby interrupted our bonding time midway with an unexpected question. “Hey, can I tell you something?” From his tone and body language I guessed this wasn’t a random, matter-of-fact query.

“O … Okay, uh, sure,” I stuttered, not believing this was happening. He was letting his defenses down and opening up to me. My hopes kicked into high gear. I could see us walking down the hallways at school as actual bros, sitting at lunch together, flirting with girls, who might actually notice me with him at my side. And then he said it.

“You walk funny.”

Wait. What? I walk funny? “What do you mean?” I asked.

“Everybody makes fun of the way you walk. Like this,” he said and then demonstrated what I can only describe as the gate of a gorilla, shoulders hunched, arms hung low. Dear Lord, I walk like that?! No way. But I had to admit he was right.

Toby, the hippest kid ever who had no reason to help a nerd like me, didn’t leave me there. He showed me how to walk like a normal person. I’d stroll down the bleachers. He’d critique and correct me until I got it right. I left the ball field that day with a new walk, an almost new friend (the order of things righted Monday, but I was okay with it), and a new life lesson.

Sometimes we need to tell the truth, even if it hurts. The Bible expresses this in a Proverb, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27:6, ESV). If we truly care about someone, we’ll risk hurting them if it means sparing them pain, embarrassment, or trouble. I’ve wondered all these years why my real friends never told me I was being made fun of. They had to have known.

Truth transforms IF we’re willing to see it, hear it, and embrace it. But as long as we’re not willing to consider the truth, we’re limited to the more dismal results of choosing to believe only what we WANT to believe.

No one understood how transformative truth is to life and all its aspects than did Jesus. That’s because of this remarkable fact about Jesus Himself:

“Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me,'” John 14:6.

You never really get to the fullness of Truth until you get to Jesus!

As a person and/or as a leader, have you limited your life, your relationships, your work or ministry, to the narrow confines of just what you WANT to believe? Or have you permeated your life (and all its aspects) with the truth, through Christ who IS truth? Are there potentially better ways, better answers, better opportunities, better methods, better ideas that you haven’t been open to that could change your life, your relationships, and/or your work or ministry?

Scotty