Telling the truth
If you regularly read our blog, I bet at some time in your life someone sat you down and “told you the truth in love.” Maybe it was about your “backsliding,” your sexual orientation, your marriage, or your attitude. Whatever it was, I bet it didn’t feel very loving.
And if you are like me, perhaps you have sat someone else down and told them the truth in love. These are memories that make me shudder. I am sure those encounters were motivated by what I thought was loving action at the time. Now I know my love was being guided by something else: fear of an idea of hell that is not Biblical and does not correspond to the loving God I believe in.
The letter to the Ephesians calls on us to “put away falsehood” and to “speak the truth” (4:25). The next verses advise us not to let the sun go down on our anger. A reasonable conclusion is that the verse tells us to speak the truth of our anger to the other before the sun goes down, or in the moment, “lest the devil make a foothold.”
One of my favourite pastimes is to listen to someone quote a Bible verse to make an argument, then respond to them with, “But do you know what it says after that?” It’s alarming how few people do. in the case of Ephesians 4, the letter writer goes on to say that our words should only build each other up, that our words should give grace to those who hear them.
At Harbor we talk about truth as more than fact. When Jesus says, “I am the Truth,” he doesn’t mean “I am the accuracy,” or “I am the certainty.” Even the phrase “I am” communicates that truth is embodied, comes from our being and our bodies. Our intuition, emotions, consciousness, intellect, reason, and nervous systems are all sources of truth.
I was discussing this passage recently with some friends. I was talking about the relationship between the head and the heart, that our words should not just come from fact or just from emotion, but from a conversation between the two. Clarence responded, “There’s one problem. Between the head and the heart is the mouth, and that’s where we get into trouble.” How right he is. I’m one of the quickest speakers I know.
Then we thought of another way to look at that head-heart conversation. Perhaps the mouth is in exactly the right place, a meeting place for the head and the heart to be expressed together, so our fact does not come out cold and cruel and our feelings do not lash out and overwhelm others.
In my experience, those who claim to tell someone the truth in love are leaving their heart out of the conversation. They state doctrines and ideas, gather their rehearsed phrases, and tie it up in a bow with the words, “I am telling you this because I love you.” If we allow the heart to mingle with those words, with compassion and empathy, how we communicate would change dramatically. Rather than seeing the truth as only the content of what we say, we consider how it will be received, who is receiving it, and whether our words will bring grace or harm. Maybe sometimes telling the truth in love means not saying anything at all.
Loving communication isn’t simply telling the truth. Loving communication is conversation between heads and hearts—between lives, ideas, imagination, compassion, and curiousity. You will know it when it happens, because you will feel the love being expressed. You won’t have to be told it is there. If the communication is loving, then the speaker should feel no need to say the word “love” at all.
