Distilling Truth in Deeply Divided Times

​Are the lines straight or angled?

      The number one thing that I have been asked to do in my twenty-seven years as a Director of Missions has been to step in and help a church in a time of conflict. As I have listened, I have heard brothers and sisters in Christ describe what had happened in a deeply divided narrative. Their stories are so different that I wonder, “Can they really be talking about the same incident, on the same planet, in the same universe, in the same time-space continuum?” A statement I always make is “Although your perception IS your reality; your reality is not always TRUTH.” As I say it and then explain it briefly, I try to do it with a little bit of humor knowing that what I have just said carries a little bite with it.
     Today we live in an entire nation that is deeply divided. If you listen to a variety of news sources, you will hear a very different perspective on current events. I have found it has become more challenging to have a good conversation with someone who has a very different perspective. All of us have become entrenched in our positions, and to one degree or another have been blinded by our perceptions to the absolute truth of any given situation.
     In His trial before Pilate, Jesus stated, “I came into the world, to testify to the TRUTH. Everyone who belongs to the TRUTH listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Unfortunately too often we are like Pilate whose response to Jesus was, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)
     When I have encountered conflict in churches and in my own life, I have found that a huge contributor has always been a clouding of TRUTH by each individual’s perceptions. Stop and ask yourself, “What informs my perceptions?” Stay tuned for more to come, but let me suggest two biggies:

• How about your assumptions? We assume that we know the very heart and motives of others. The premise of what is now called a Hate Crime is that we can know the motive in the heart of another human being. This is complicated by the very fact that we don’t even know our own hearts. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9. So if apart from Christ, we cannot see our own hearts with clarity, how on earth can you tell me with a straight face that you know what is in the heart of another human being?
• How about time distortion? I was joking earlier about time-space continuums, but in dealing with conflict I have often seen two major time distortions. One is that people will ALWAYS tell you that the other person started it. I heard the story of a mom who was questioning her son about a fight he had with a neighbor’s son. His response was that “the neighbor’s son started it when he hit me back!” A second-time distortion comes when I ask individuals who have laid out a sequence of events to tell me when the various events they just described took place. On several occasions, I have heard situations that only moments earlier had been described as “current events” suddenly become incidents that took place one, five, ten, and yes I’ve even heard fifty years ago!

      My counsel is to approach every challenging situation with a huge dose of humility, an abundance of prayer, and a desire to seek TRUTH from the Lord. Conflicts are a natural part of life, but we can learn to handle them in an unnatural way. A truly Godly way.