Experience Vs. Truth

Sincerity doesn’t equal truth.

It’s a phrase I’d grown quite accustomed to in my Christian life.  Where I come from, this compelling and thought-provoking phrase was used primarily to help others understand that their experiences, no matter how sincere they may have been, may not have been right.  Meaning they may not have been in line with the Bible.

This came from a well-intentioned place of desiring to help people understand what it meant to truly follow the Bible and to understand the danger in allowing experiences to either lead us or – worse yet – to influence our understanding of truth.

I’ve spent the bulk of my life happy to sacrifice experience on the altar of ultimate truth.  This truth was defined by my understanding of the scriptures, one that was handed down to me by zealous and committed Christians when I was a young adult, and then continually reinforced over the course of nearly two decades.  Not only was I prepared to sacrifice my own experiences on the altar of ultimate truth, but I was also insistent that other people sacrifice their non-compliant experiences there as well.

But what happens when our experiences – or those of others – lead us places that don’t seem to align with what we’ve defined as truth?  I always thought we should dismiss them outright, perhaps even clamping down all the harder on what we’ve always understood to be true.  It seemed like the right thing to do.  It was hard to consider that perhaps God might be trying to move me or others in a new direction.

There came a point in my walk as a Christian where something was eating at me.  Something just didn’t seem right about the story.  Or at least my faith tradition’s understanding and telling of the story.  I couldn’t pinpoint it, though.  After all, the answers I’d grown accustomed to still lined up.  Everything I was doing added up to my understanding of truth.  And because sincerity doesn’t equal truth, I was hesitant to consider what my heart seemed so sincerely to be telling me: that something just wasn’t quite right.  That’s a story for elsewhere, but suffice it to say, I’m quite familiar with the struggle between experience and truth.

And speaking of that struggle, last fall I had the pleasure of having lunch with Rob and Linda Robertson.  For more than three hours, we sat across the table from each other and shared our lives.  I listened to the painstaking, tragic, and yet somehow amazingly beautiful story of the journey they embarked on when they found out their pre-teen son was gay.  If you haven’t read their story, you need to.  You absolutely need to.  Prior to meeting them, I’d read the story and I’d listened to their talk at the Exodus International conference (tissues required), so as we were hanging out together, they shared other aspects of their story.

For these two amazing people, experience didn’t merely have a fender bender with truth.  No, truth and experience had a head-on collision.  The truth of what they always thought God was telling people through the Bible unraveled as they allowed God to move in their lives, trusting that God was speaking to and leading them in a powerful way.  In a way that seemed to be in conflict with the words that they had always thought defined truth.

As I listened to Rob talk about painfully coming to know the presence and truth of God in a more intimate way than he had ever experienced before, I was captivated, but also stunned as he uttered something that on the surface seems almost unthinkable.  It was the incredible paradox of enduring the ongoing pain from having lost his son – the ultimate outcome of what began as his family’s well-intended attempts to uphold what they believed was God’s truth – with having gained a transformed faith and a newfound intimacy with God that he wouldn’t trade for anything.  Take a moment to read that again and then a minute or two to ponder it.  Especially the “that he wouldn’t trade for anything” part.  How is something like that even possible?

I was speechless.  How could I possibly listen to a story so powerful and painful, so transformative in a hauntingly beautiful kind of way, and deny its truth?  The fact is, I didn’t deny it.  I felt it.  I embraced it.  And I celebrated it.

But what really humbles me is that there was a time in the not-too-distant past when I could’ve listened to their story and somehow had the arrogance and audacity to utter some variation of “sincerity doesn’t equal truth.”  And then go on to share Bible verses in a good-hearted attempt to warn this couple that they were being sentimental, that their souls were in jeopardy, and that they were clearly being led astray by Satan, all the while certain that I was standing up for God’s honor (as if God really needs me to do that).

Sure, I might not have done it in the moment (I certainly hope I wouldn’t have been that tactless).  And regardless of when or where it happened, I would’ve done it with overflowing, genuine compassion.  Absolutely.  And my own heart probably would’ve been breaking in the process, feeling their pain, all the while urging the importance of letting go of sentimentality in order to embrace truth.  It’s what we call “speaking the truth in love,” as the book of Ephesians puts it.

And I know that some people think that by not taking such an approach, I fall in the category of someone whose faith is weak or who is simply listening to what his itching ears want to hear.  Perhaps someone who is just being sentimental himself.  Because depending on how we approach and interpret the Bible, there may be very little room for us to give weight to experiences.  In fact, there might not be room at all.

But if we don’t truly trust that God can use experiences to move, shape, and transform us, to guide us into new depths of growth and understanding and being human – all of which may very well conflict with what we’ve always thought to be right and true – then what do we have?

After all, many of the stories within the pages of the Bible show us that experiences move people to play key roles in accomplishing something greater than themselves.  Moses received his calling to lead the Israelites out of slavery through a mysterious experience related to us in the story of a burning bush.  In the story of Jonah, we read of a man who was so opposed to preaching about God’s goodness to a group of people who fell outside the tribal boundaries of the Jewish nation that it took being thrown from a ship into a raging sea and spending time in the belly of a fish to push him in the right direction.  And in the book of Acts, Peter had a visionary experience on a rooftop which led him to a conclusion that flew in the face of everything his Jewish tradition had taught him about what was “clean and unclean.”

I get the desire for unchanging, ultimate truth.  I’ve clung to it for most of my life.  Not only does it seem responsible, but without it, we fear that everything will unravel because there won’t be any certainty.  Nothing to hold on to.  Peter probably thought the same thing in the book of Acts.  Maybe that’s why his initial response to eating something unclean was an emphatic “Surely not, Lord!”  Because this experience – where he was being called to go – didn’t align with what he thought to be true.  And what he thought to be true was based on his faith tradition and an understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures – his Bible.  Think about that.

I think it’s natural that we all want ultimate truth.  One that’s clearly defined, black and white, and never evolving.  But maybe the truth we’re desperately after is actually less encompassing than we think it needs to be, and yet, in another paradox, somehow all-encompassing at the same time.

Maybe there’s far more of a simplicity to ultimate truth.  One that’s desperately uncomfortable, at least initially.  And maybe that simplicity is that God is God.  And God is enough.  And so if we find ourselves being called to move beyond the certainty of the status quo to uncharted territories, we can do so with confidence, knowing that God can take care of it all.