Never do my creative juices flow more freely than when I’m describing a physical ailment I’m experiencing. My gift for hyperbole peaks when I’m trying to impress upon my listener, usually my poor husband, the intensity of some woe I’m enduring.
Such was the case this past spring and summer when my sinuses were apparently possessed by some kind of demon straight from you-know-where. When my hubby would ask me how I was feeling—usually before my first cup of coffee when he knew I was least able to produce many words—it was challenging to adequately describe my allergy-induced stupor.
I most often reverted to my usual description: “I feel like my brain has Saran Wrap around it.”
The first time I used that phrase to describe my state of fuzzy-headedness, my husband looked at me like I was nuts, a response I’m not at all unfamiliar with. I explained that it felt like my brain was suffocating and I was trying to see and interpret the world through many blurry layers of plastic wrap.
Watching the news lately, I’ve concluded that the brains of a whole lot of people must be metaphorically wrapped in layers of Saran Wrap. But their fuzzy, distorted thinking isn’t caused by allergies but by a lack of passion for one thing: the truth.
Whenever we care more about what we want than what is true, we’ve boarded the bullet train to deception and destruction. Nations have fallen and individual lives have been shattered because people stopped caring about or seeking the truth.
Our culture tells us “you have your truth” and “I have my truth” and both are equally true. I disagree. I believe there’s just THE truth and we need to peel the Saran Wrap off our brains and doggedly pursue it.
Why? Why isn’t “relative truth” okay? Because objective truth is the necessary bedrock for everything that is supposed to bring healthy order to our lives. When those in authority stop caring about what is true and right, and seek only to further their own personal agendas, the result is chaos and every sort of evil (see James 3:16).
But an even more important reason for us to seek and prioritize objective truth, one with eternal consequences, is this: if we stick with it long enough, a sincere quest for truth ultimately always leads to God, and when we find Him, we find everything.
“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart,” God promises (Jeremiah 29:13).
My observation is that those who search half-heartedly usually stop along the way and settle for lies.
Spiritually speaking, I was a bit of a confused mess as a teenager, but I was honestly and passionately seeking truth. I wandered down a few dead-end paths, but because God promises to satisfy the seeking heart (Psalm 107:9), He eventually led me to Himself and satisfied mine.
When I finally heard and understood that Jesus came to make a way for me to have a real relationship with the very real God, I knew that was the truth.
It’s been many years now since my “THAT’S IT!” epiphany, and I’ve never found anything false in Jesus Christ or the Bible. When I’ve misunderstood His ways or His Word, I’ve always later realized I just needed to grow more to grasp it.
In a world where relatively few consider the Bible to be the plum line for truth, those of us who do are called narrow-minded, phobic, and worse. But on that day when we each stand before our Creator, I think it will be clear that those of us who believed Him weren’t the ones with Saran Wrap around our brains.