Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:
Regarding the efficacy of truth, isn't it more about our ability to receive it than anything else?
Truth is. It's always there.
What isn't 'always there' is our receptivity to it. At the very least, our receptivity to truth is often mitigated by how much of it we can take in, at any given point.
So much of this is a function of where one is in life — age, development, experience, current circumstance, etc.
Our experiences (good and bad) also influence our disposition to what is true — to open us up (or close ourselves off).
And, isn't it the case, more often than not, that it is our encounters with these realities of life that create the opportunities for our receptivity to what is true?
I can say, first hand, that it is often the pain of loss that most vividly gets my attention. I say it that way because I also think we are always absorbing much more than we realize and sometimes it is the more dramatic moments that put those things in sharper relief. In other words, what we turn to in such moments has been developing all along, but are afforded greater opportunity when we are disrupted. Perhaps it is then that the two are forced to merge (or be rejected out of hand).
I lost a professional job at one point in my younger life. And, as a result, I face-planted into the granularity of what I thought I believed. It was an event that revealed what I largely knew only in part (mostly in my thinking). Rough spots in my marriage got my attention, too. And, other things like physical problems that required intervention, periods of emotional unhealthiness, rejection from my community. All of these have created new opportunities for me to receive things about what it true in new, different, and deeper ways. For what it's worth, I didn't always automatically receive them either — some of the receiving took a while.
And, now, the challenge our son and his wife are facing with his brain cancer (you can follow this link thread for more details). In many conversations about this circumstance, it has been increasingly clear that paradox is an important way of describing what sometimes feel like dueling realities — terror and hope, pain and relief, joy and grief, known and unknown, present and future. It's not really the case that what sometimes seems like such opposites were not involved before. It's just that their proximity to us right now imposes something on us — on me, on Tami, on our family...not to mention on Conner and Gina.
We might like to think that we are the directors of our lives (managers of what is true). But, truth be told, we are in reality much more simply receivers of it. And, as life unfolds (with both the good and bad of it), we have the chance to not only only be expanded by the truth of life, but also in some mysterious way ... embraced by it.
