Five Minute Friday ~ Truth

"Mama? Are you true?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" I asked back. One of the few things I've learned as a mom is not to answer until I'm sure I know the question and often that means much more than just hearing the spoken words.

"When I ask you something and you say 'Yes,' do you always really mean your answer?"

Once again, God uses the ten and under squad to confront me on my behavior and whether my words and my actions all line up. But the point of this post isn't to me-bash (even though I could - because the more I think about it the more I see all of the times I'm inconsistent or unclear with my yeses), it is the fact that my girl's question got me to thinking about true and truth.

The etymology of true is fascinating. It germinates, in the early Germanic tongues, from the same root as the word tree... which, in turn, grows out of the Indo-European word for wood... something solid, something firm, something with which amazing structures can be built. (That's what happens when you are a lover of words... you learn and remember trivia like that...) Truth and trees really aren't so very different.

Last summer we visited Sequoia National Forest (talk about some amazing). Those huge, solid, ancient, withstanding-so-many-forces-of-nature trees had one "enemy." Man. Cutting, building around and choking out, trampling and eroding the soil around the roots, creating tourist attractions like tunnels a car can drive through...

Then it struck me. Sometimes we... hu-"men" and followers of Jesus... can be more detrimental in our careless, mistaken or purposeful duplicity of Truth than Truth's sworn enemies when to a watching world, lives and words just don't match up.

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Just for the fun of it... a couple of my favorite "truth" quotes.

In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

~ George Orwell ~

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

~ Mahatma Gandhi ~

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