Where is Truth?

If you want to know where truth is, you have to look past drama.

Drama is our gut reaction.  It is seeing the strongest flares in every situation.  It's drama that looks at the circumstance and becomes adamant.  Webster time!  Adamant: inflexible, unyielding.  (And, I just discovered, that is the second definition for the word; the first entry is "a stone believed to be impenetrably hard."  You learn something every day.  For these purposes, that definition also works.)  Because that's what drama is - it is blinded to everything but what it first senses in a moment.  It's got a one-track mind, and drama will derail you.

You know it's true: we're never really mad about what we think we're mad about.  We're never sad for the reasons we think we are sad.  We're never hurt for the reasons we think we're hurt.  There's something underneath the drama that is actual, and that is truth.

It's the difference between being emotional and raw emotion.  If we can move beyond the drama, we'll find a tender place of truth within us.

Drama turns us outward.  It makes us biting to those around us, because we see our circumstance and even our reaction as their fault.  Someone else's idiocy ruined our perfectly happy, content, good lives.  Drama takes hold of that and muses over a broken world.  A world less than desirable.  A world that can't be fixed.  A world we're always going to have to stand against.  It makes us defensive.  Suddenly, we're living hostile to our world.

Truth turns us inward.  It realizes that all the drama, all the raw emotion of the moment, is not because the world sucks but because there is a raw place within us that has yet to be touched by Love.  Truth takes the moment to pray because it knows there is a question that has to be answered, not by a world but by a truth.  It acknowledges that it is not happy with the circumstance, but it is willing to go deeper and expose the sore spot.  It makes us honest.  Suddenly, we're living graciously to our world.

It's the woman who finds out she's earning less than the man in the cubicle next to her.  Drama puts her on a crusade of feminism, fighting loudly for women's rights, demanding better employment practices, throwing all of her efforts into changing her paycheck.  Truth reminds her that what really stings is the questions this brings up of her worth, what she's been asking for years.  That she's never believed she was good at anything, and here's the proof.  That she's lived her life trying to prove herself and just when she thought she had, she found out she wasn't even close.  Truth exposes that rawness inside of her, and she throws her efforts into healing her heart.

It's the man who lets his teenage son borrow the car only to get a call from the police that there's been an accident.  Drama yells and screams about the totaled car and grounds his son and goes after teen driving laws and speed limits and anything else he can think of and never lets his son live it down.  It rips the two apart.  Truth knows the heart of the matter is that the father knows that mangled mess could have been his son.  He knows they could have pulled his son out of the same ditch in just as many pieces, and he'd have lost something precious.  It brings the two together.

The things we go after when gripped with drama are not necessarily bad, as you can see.  There should be equality for men and women in the workplace.  We should do all we can to protect our children.  But in drama, we go after these things because we're angry.  Or hurt.  Or sad.  We're emotional about them, and we see them as justice.  If we move past drama and into truth, we go after these things because they are right.  We're honest about them, and they are Love.  It's love because suddenly, it's for everyone.  It's not to vindicate us or make us feel better.  It's not for our sake or for our case; it's for building something a little better.  It's for everyone.

Truth makes it love.

And in the interim, on our journey from justice to love, from drama to truth, we pass through some of the rawest places in our own lives.  If we can be honest about them, we may just find an answer to a question we didn't know we were asking.  It's not pleasant to be there, to linger in our woundedness, but if we don't take this moment, there will be more drama.  We can count on that.  Because as long as we let the raw places lay in our lives, this world is going to touch them.

Let's move past drama and into truth, not only to heal ourselves, but to be Love.