None of us had perfect parents.
All of us have flaws. Why, then, do we imagine we’re more right than we
actually are? And, most of the time we would rather protect our parents from
the shame of their failures in not bringing us up ‘properly’, when
realistically all parents make the same sorts of errors, not accounting for the mistakes
of abuse and neglect.
If we’re committed to the truth we
will see our parents’ fault, acknowledge it for what it is, forgive them, and
move on in love.
Simple thesis, here: we cannot
love unconditionally without going the full journey with truth. The truth will set us free (John 8:32), but
where we allow non-truths to fix themselves to us we’ll be bonded.
The Infinite Nature of Truth
So, the truth will set us free,
and, if we can imagine truth being infinite in its nature, we may understand
that there is no limit to the quality and extent of freedom we might
experience.
Surely none of us has come close
to the total amount of experienced freedom available for approaching the fullness
of truth within our lives.
We all have more work to do if we
want more freedom; spiritual freedom. The outworking of such freedom is the
Fruit of the Spirit. Hope, joy, peace, love, patience, etc, can all be ours, within
our characters, more in their fullness.
But first, we have our work to do
in exploring the grand truths that lay folded up in our futures and, therefore,
ready for the unfolding. We may fear going there, addressing the ills of our
childhoods, for fear of disrespecting parents, or worse, perhaps, because we
fear what the truth will do to us.
We should have no fear, because if
we truly believe God is with us, God will not forsake us.
Where Our Parents and Upbringing Fit In
For most of us it’s not so much
what our parents did to us, but what they didn’t do for us. As I look at my own parenting,
notwithstanding the things, as a family, that we are proud of, there are so
many things I haven’t done or haven’t done well enough. This is something for
my children to work out as they become their own persons in adulthood. It’s their task, much as it is our task to grow into the
fullness of our truth, as God presents it in the context of our lives.
It’s our task, also, and our
heaviest responsibility, to grow into the fullness of truth—our truth. There is
no truth more relevant for our learning than our own truth—that which remains
buried in the past. When we are able to plumb those depths, even briefly, we
are growing more into the fullness of our truth.
Our truth—our history—is not an
abstract set of truths.
It’s historical truth, and God
gives us the opportunity in wrangling with it. When we do this and we learn to
explore without fear, God opens up all sorts of special revelations, revealing
his perfect truth to us. This counters our historical truth; we challenge what
we have always believed and we conform these beliefs to the truth, or we reject
them. There, in that process of conforming our pasts to the truth, do we
reconcile ourselves to freedom.
***
The truth sets us free. Truth is
infinite in nature. The more we can grow into the fullness of truth,
particularly as it applies to our own lives, the more freedom we can enjoy.
This is God’s destiny for each of us; to grow into the fullness of truth so as
to grow into the fullness of God. The fullness of truth facilitates the
fullness of love.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
No comments:
Post a Comment