Healing

Confronting With Truth

by Terry Barlow
03/18/14
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Let us never be overeager to confront another human being with needed truth, or at least with truth that we perceive is needed.   It is to be considered as  a last resort.  Something else at the moment may be needed even more, if we can imagine that. Suppose we see that persons are in denial about some reality or fact in their lives or in the history of their lives. Suppose that we seek to bring that truth to light, but the lie that is being replaced is so central that it is propping up the entire pschological and emotional life.  The charade involved is often an exhausting exercise because it has to be so frequently repearted.  "The mind will find a way to rationalize what the heart embraces,"  it has been wisely said.  Why does the mind do this?  To maintain some semblance of unity with the heart and the body, lest that unity be ripped apart.  The parts or dimensions of our being prefer and seek to be united and harmonious to better survive, even if it's a false unity, based on lies.   In order to temporarily unload the guilty conscience someone else usually has to be demonoized.  Then if we attempt to kick out that prop there may be a great collapse, a great and devastating collapse.  It may require an expertise beyond our own.   Suppose they have been unconsciously basing their daily functional sanity on that lie? Are we prepared to weep with them and to stoop in shock and pick up the pieces with them, and piece together a more truthful and worthy life and sanity, all the while taking care that we aren't falling or haven't fallen into a similar delusion? (See Galatians 6 v.1-2) Are we prepared to be cursed and flatly contradicted and counter-accused? Because that, for openers, is what is likely to happen. And when it does a compassion must arise in us which overshadows any truth we offered or ever will offer. Yet the two are not separate, it is that very compassion that gives the truth any impact it can hope to have, convincing the person that you spoke because you cared. That you care deeply enough to approach at all becomes the bottom line and the enduring satisfaction of the encounter.