PENnED

Are you apprehensive about what others might say because you are already happy with what you believe to be true, and don’t want to change?

Such uncomfortable feeling is usually felt when you see others as having more knowledge in certain areas, and you feel that you can’t effectively defend your position.

For example, we don’t want to talk to an insurance or car agent on our own because we believe they have more information than we do; and we lack the information to “defend” ourselves. That’s why we bring along a friend or a family member who we believe know more about insurance policies or cars than we do to help us out.

We may know quite a few about certain personal truths that we hold dear, but we also know that we don’t have the knowledge that the experts we admire and have relied on and who “speak for us” might have.

My hunch is that we may have depended too much on experts, especially when making decisions. And we shouldn’t! We should learn things for ourselves.

Our doctors, for example, may be experts in medicine, but it helps us a lot if we learn more about, say, certain diseases. Armed with sufficient knowledge, we can help ourselves make the right decisions, which may be related to matters of life and death. And if the information we find from more reliable sources are better than what our doctor recommends, then it may be time to consult with another.

Thank God that these days information is just a Bing or Google away! We can even get the help of an AI to find information that would definitely take a lot more of our time if we’re doing research on our own and in a physical library.

When after learning more about a certain topic and we find that a certain “personal truth“ overlaps “objective truth” (anything that anyone anywhere finds to be true as a result of, say, scientific research or it is accepted by experts in the field) then that’s great! You don’t have to change your personal truth to the objective one because they’re about the same, except perhaps to make little amendments here and there to make the former more like, if not the same, as the latter.

But what if your personal truth is contradicted by objective truth? Would you abandon it and embrace objective truth?

What you do about objective truths would depend on what you are. If you are a “personal truth defender” then you would defend your personal truths or might just avoid conversations related to them. But if you are an “objective truth seeker” your’e not afraid to know the truth. And, as they say, you “follow the truth no matter where it leads.” And that is quite liberating!

As Jesus said, in John 8:31-32, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. ³² Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”