Accepting lies about the truth

For all the negativity and distractions that exist on social media, I still find myself grateful for a tool with which I can occasionally check up on friends' lives, no matter how distant, or how much time has past since my last face to face meeting with them. I love how each person's social profile is a combination of photo album, journal, and scrap book. One of the things I particularly love is being able to watch each person over the course of several years morph and change as they react to life and the path they have chosen. I enjoy watching friends' kids growing up, seeing people reach life goals and accomplishments. I really dig watching their thoughts on travels they take, and events they attend. The window into their lives that social media provides is awesome. Most of the time. 

Occasionally, though, I find myself watching some people gradually walking away from things that they were very passionate about in their earlier years. I have watched friends who were artists walk away from their art, people who were driven with very specific goals reach a point where those goals changed or disappeared altogether. Worse yet, I watch people who slowly turn their backs on their belief in God. This is always the most disheartening. 

Let me be clear about something. I don't look at these people and their choices from a perspective of being in the right. I don't judge their decisions based off of mine, as if I have somehow figured out life better than they have, or as if I were somehow a better person, better Christian, more in touch with the Lord, etc. I have no position to call anyone's hand and say they have made the wrong choices. It's not my place, and I'm generally far too busy cleaning up the mess from my own wrong choices to try and point any fingers.

Yet what truly saddens me is that I see choices that these people make, and I know that they are choices which would have, at one point, made them very upset had they seen another make the same choice. I've noticed friends who were genuinely passionate about their relationship with the Lord reach a point in their lives where they don't acknowledge even having a relationship with Him. People who made hard choices to sacrifice family, finances, time, and every other resource at their disposal to follow passionately after what they felt the Lord had called them to. When I got to know many of these friends, they were in a place where their passion, their calling demanded all of their focus, and they were deep in their commitment to it. Yet many of these people I have watched over several years reach a point where that focus, passion, and even calling are totally non-existent. 

Bear in mind that all of this is from the casual observances of their online profile. Perhaps it doesn't tell the full story. In fact, it is almost always a fairly biased and quite rosy persona that one sees online. I am fully guilty of the same thing. Yet there is enough there, or perhaps enough lacking, that I can't help but have doubts raised in my mind. One friend, who was a youth pastor for several years, is now in a place where he regularly posts updates to his profile which are articles touting his new-found atheist beliefs. Another, an artist with a very large following on social media, felt the need a few years ago to announce that he no longer subscribed to any belief in God, and felt that God had never really done anything in his life. This from a person who I saw lead hundreds of young people to the Lord. A very passionate preacher, consummate performer, and a person who always shared his story exclusively from the perspective of what the Lord had done in his life. These, and many other stories have brought me to a place of questioning things. What happened? Perhaps more impactful, how do I avoid reaching the same place? 

Again, this is asked not from a place of being in the right. I ask from a place of humility, walking out my own struggle. I am curious about these friends in the same way that I look at friends who have walked through divorce. How did they get there, and how in the world can I avoid whatever path took them to that place? 

I believe that circumstances are always a heavy factor in taking a person to a place of rejecting their faith and their worldview. But I also believe that the place they were in originally was a place of strength, and something must have eroded away internally to bring them to a place of denying what was once their actual armor and weapons, what was once the thing they sought to be defined by. 

Thinking about, and praying for, many of these friends and examining their trajectory through the very jaded and biased lens of social media has brought me to a realization of sorts, albeit one that I am still sifting through. 

This is a brief note that I wrote a few days ago, from a time of processing this issue:

 "Somewhere along the line, you accepted the lie that the truth is what you make it, and I'm sorry for that because that lie is the source of all that has ever been wrong in your life."

What I suspect (and could perhaps be quite wrong about, admittedly) is that there has been a slow creeping lie that has entered many people's minds which has eroded their perception of the truth. What truths they accepted as absolutes in their earlier days of passion and calling have somehow been chipped away at slowly, and it has brought them to a place where they accept the lie that the truth is relative. Truth is not relative, not in any definition of it. 

An analogy that one of my best friends uses is that you can, over the course of time, convince yourself that the color red is actually blue. You can find articles online to support your definition, you can quote experts on it, you can find many many other people who all think the same thing. In reality, however, the color red is still red. 

Many people, I think, reach similar decisions about their relationship with the Lord. Perhaps they have felt distant from the Lord for many years. Perhaps they have cried out to him from a genuine place of searching, and their search has been in vain. Maybe they asked for healing for a family member that still passed. Perhaps they were badly hurt in relationship, and the hurt caused was blamed on the Lord. Whatever the case, I believe that there are absolute truths that cannot be altered no matter what your beliefs. 

Gravity, for example, will never be altered. There will never be a point in time in all of eternity where the earth is not held in place by the bonds of gravity. With technology we are able to power ourselves temporarily into the air, seeming to defy gravity, but it is still an absolute law. If we run out of jet fuel, our airplane will be dragged back down to earth by gravity. If we slip past the atmosphere and away from the earth's gravitational pull, we may float for a while in the void of space, but only until another planet, moon, meteor, etc, comes along and we are then subject to it's gravitational influence. Still bound by the law of gravity. 

God's grace, His desire for relationship, His love for us, His pursuit of us, is much the same. It is an absolute truth. You can subscribe to any belief system and worldview that you want. You can deny His existence, and post articles on your social profile touting the latest scientific discoveries which disprove God's existence, but it does not change the truth. God loves you and pursues you as much as the color red will always be red. It is not God who changes, but us. Our beliefs change, our lives change. Circumstances, hardships, unanswered prayers, unmet hopes and dreams and goals can all influence the place that we are at in our lives, and what our beliefs are IF WE ACCEPT THE LIE THAT THE TRUTH IS WHAT WE MAKE IT. 

I believe that God's desire is for us to accept that His Truth does not change, as He himself does not change. There is strength in that to withstand any hardship, any turbulence. If we believe the truth that God's love is more constant and unchanging than the law of gravity, I think we can position ourselves in the right place. A place of strength, a place of continued passion, calling, drive, vision, and eternal life. 

My prayer for myself first, and second for my friends far and near, is that we will all reach a point of accepting that the truth is not what we choose it to be. As we seek truth, it will always eventually lead us to the Author of all Truth.