PATIENCE

Eventually truth cuts through the fog 

Truth is that which accords with fact or reality. Most of what is true is self-evident, in that it requires neither explanation nor justification. It just is, and people know it. The question is whether they will accept it when it is hard to accept.

Truth is hard to accept when it conflicts with one’s wants and feelings. I want to eat until I feel like I am full. But if I do that, I will get fat. That is a self-evident fact that does not require my acceptance to be true. And yet I periodically find myself enveloped in an explanatory fog of justification that obscures its truth. I have fought a lifelong battle against obesity that requires daily discipline. Wearied by it, I sometimes give in to the fog and stop weighing myself and counting calories, believing that there is another way. But the truth eventually cuts through, in the form of tight pants.

I look at my thumb and think for a moment of all it allows me to do. Without thumbs, I could not grasp, pinch, or hold things—buttons, shoelaces, zippers, doorknobs, toothbrushes would all be useless for me. The usefulness of the thumb is self-evident. No surprise then that the Bible references the human hand over 1,600 times.

Despite the self-evident usefulness of my thumbs, I spent the first 42 years of my life believing that they resulted from random mutation rather than divine design. I did not want to believe that the Creator gave me my thumbs because then I would have to use them for His purposes rather than my own. Wandering through the fog self-justification, I avoided anything or anyone that challenged my feelings with the truth.

Until the day I could avoid it no more, because eventually truth cuts through the fog.