Unafraid of the Truth (On Mother’s Day)

Last updated on: May 14, 2017 at 7:56 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Unafraid of the Truth (On Mother’s Day) 2017-05-13T16:53:05-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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The truth is fearful, but we must be unafraid of finding and following the truth. My mom taught me this lesson when I was a boy as I watched her change her mind, consider her deepest ideas, and then act on them. Truth is unmoving and if you pursue it with care, you will (almost surely) find that you have been wrong or that even when you are right, you have been right badly. Mom just kept pushing on . . . not relentlessly, that is joylessly, but naturally as if that is what a human being should do. She knew the truth might be fearful, but she was unafraid.

Knowing something scary is out there is a fact, but how we approach that reality is (to some extent) a choice. Mom accepted the fact and made a choice: she would follow the truth.

She did the hardest thing many times: look at what her peers were doing and decide they were wrong, but then reject being a mere reactionary. Why is this hardest? Mom would see a problem, men demeaning women, but also see that what the magazines were blaring at her was not the answer. She would think, consider, and then end up in a position that was in some ways traditional, but not the way Americans had been doing it.

She did not love or glorify the way things had been done, but was also willing to defend some of the ideas of the past. Following truth, best she knew, often meant being too liberal for the reactionaries and too Christian for the cutting edge. She was the sort of person critical of Gloria Steinman and Anita Bryant.

As she talked to women, helping real people, she listened and considered what God was doing. Trumpets would blare and call the church to march to the left or to the right or to plant stolidly in the middle. Her reaction was baffling to me at times: she would agree with nobody totally and disagree with everybody a bit.

“No,” she often says, “that’s not quite it.” She would agree with both on some things, but her only party was, is, and I suspect always will be the truth. “Let’s get to the bottom of it. . .” was a family saying as I got older and the more she helped me this way the less afraid I was of being different.

Being a truth follower meant Mom was willing to consider doing a great many things, but almost never did crazy stuff. Christianity in the 1960’s and 1970’s presented many temptations: one to stodgy reaction and the other to revolutionary change. Mom considered both, rejected both, and steered an interesting middle course.

Why? Truth seeking means no guru or easy packaged answer long held appeal. Maybe we should only eat natural foods, or the “positive confession” would solve problems, or we should join the Moral Majority. Maybe. And it was the maybe that always saved her (and us!) as she would keep thinking, asking questions, comparing what she saw and heard with the Bible, her own experience of God, and history.

As a result, we would eat better foods, but not go all nuts. We stopped tearing ourselves down, but did not pretend our words could control God. We loved our country, but without lying about the past.

Following the move of the Holy Spirit is a better, deeper description of truth seeking. Where the Spirit is there is liberty, but also license as people misunderstand and misuse what God is saying. We have all seen people we love become merely trendy or stop growing.

Mom never will, because if the Spirit is moving forward, she will follow best she can, naturally, lovingly, right to the end. The end will be fearful, that dreadful Day of the Lord, but she is teaching me still to be unafraid, because the awful Day will be the start of pure joy.

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