Black Truth

Truth is like silly putty. You can bend it, stretch it, pull it until it is completely unrecognizable from its original form. Regardless, it always returns to the only thing it is whether you want it to or not. - Theba Glady

If you have never had the experience of sitting in a courtroom, listening to someone bear earnest, slanderous false witness against you or someone you love, you will never fully appreciate the importance of the analogy between truth and silly putty.

Since we have a legal system, rather than a justice system, you have no recourse but to take it gracefully on the chin while your character is used for a dartboard. It is in that moment that you hope another old axiom is true, which is, time heals all wounds and wounds all heels. For some, this is little or no comfort. Most people want justice dealt out instantly. We are deluded to expect that unfairness, in any form, should be met with rapid retaliation. This is only because humiliation, outrage, and incense boil up into your chest like heartburn. Naturally you want relief and your first impulse is to believe that somehow setting about to prove what is untrue will reap relief.

We are so temporal, we think we require instant gratification, believing time is our foe instead of our friend. We shake our fists at the injustices we see. Innocents die and murderers walk free. Hateful gossip ruins reputations and causes life altering grief. Thoughtless and/or calculatedly malicious actions foster countless number of senseless troubles. And as bad as these are, none are as insidious as black truth. Unlike a white lie, where the author knows it is untrue, a black truth becomes real to the person who has crafted it. It is a created reality for this person so it becomes real enough for others to be convinced as well. Whole belief systems are often founded on nothing more than a single individual’s black truth.

The bad news is, most of us will come up against black truth sooner or later. The good news is, there is a strategy to triumph over it, if you are willing to be patient. We are told we have free will but this only means we are given the opportunity to choose to be vessels of honor or vessels of dishonor. God will use us either way, but if you believe that all things work together for God’s good purpose, then you must also believe that He is working good things through you at all times, regardless of how it looks to you. This doesn’t mean that you can’t stand up for yourself or that you must accept abuse. It only means that you should have developed the fine-tuned listening skills it takes to hear when God is whispering for you to be still and watch. More often than not, through life crisis, He is teaching and it is in these times it behooves us to be fully engaged in a learning mode.

Learning to wait is undoubtedly the hardest lesson in life because we permit the unknown to threaten and overwhelm us. Instead of saying “peace be still”, fully trusting the storm to turn, we succumb to the fear of that which seems to be out of our control. We then become victims. If one can find comfort in knowing there is, indeed, a final judgment, one never has to be devastated by black truth. Even if it seems for a time that the whole world is willing to believe the worst of you, you can still choose to be a vessel of honor. Having made that choice, you can be at peace with losing any battle, knowing the war has already been won.

You see, God knows the difference between lies, white lies, black truth and real truth. Not even black truth, though it gathers up followers and devoted believers like a vacuum, can survive the ultimate cleansing power of that which is genuinely true. God sorts it all out in His good time. The irony is, since liars live as though there is no God or final judgment, they won’t know how wrong they have been, until it is too late.

For Him,

Meema

Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment. (Proverbs 12:19)