Truth Box

Our topic last week was "Truth Box"...the idea is that we each have inside of us a "truth box" in which are the beliefs we hold. Most of the contents have been put in there throughout life based on our experiences and what people we trusted have told us. The rub comes when what we hold in our box doesn't line up with reality. We talked a lot about the character of God and were challenged to examine our box to see if the beliefs we held lined up with the character of who God is. As you can imagine, many do not.

This sounds simplistic and easy, but let me tell you - it was not! When you believe something, it is very hard to change your view on it. Last week was exhausting and by Thursday I felt totally drained. I took probably 40 pages of notes throughout the week! Of course, I'll never be able to give justice to the teaching - being directly involved is really the only way to have it soak in deep - but I will try to summarize my (FORTY PAGES) notes here...

We began by just simply asking the question "How do you know the things you know?" There were lots of answers; school, experience, logical expression, reading, etc. Essentially, everything we know came from outside of us, and was then put inside of us - in short, by someone telling us or by experience. From there we went down a philosophy trail a bit. We discussed the possibilty of a square earth (as opposed to round). We each had to admit we had not actually seen the entire earth, nor measured it out, but in fact had trusted teachers, books and pictures as being a true representation of the earths' shape...essentially, we were told so as children and we trusted the person who told us, so we believed it.

We then defined truth as "agreeing with reality" and we defined reality as "the thing that is" (are you having fun yet?). Therefore, untruth would then be defined as disagreeing with reality, having a false perception, believing a lie.

We also agreed that truth can be complementary, but never contradictory, and that two opposite realities simply cannot exist (logic...always the most fun class in college!). A real issue in the world today is the question posed by Pilate, and that is "WHAT is truth?"...this question is based on the assumption that truth is subjective and unable to be proven. It boils down to a morality that says you can never be deceived, and that there is no right or wrong. This was big with me as I see a lot of this in my area of the country.

It comes to this - that our "truth box" becomes the authority in our lives by which we live our life and make all of our decisions. The two areas in which the most important beliefs come in are our pictures of God and our pictures of ourselves. Basically, we had to come to the place where we admit that everything in our truth box is NOT necessarily true! To me this is a big "DUH"...I think any woman could honestly say this as we come to the place where we look honestly at ourselves and realize that we are not seeing ourselves (our bodies) for what they really are - we focus on the negative so much because the media presents this impossible picture of beauty (a lie), and we buy into it.

As we spent time examining our truth box, we also spent a lot of time examining the character of God and what lies we have in our boxes regarding Him. The biggest one I got, I already shared - that is, that I wasn't trusting Him to bring a daddy into Sierra's life...so, I've had to get real with myself about some trust issues I've got with God!!!

This week we are looking at the Father Heart of God, so going deeper into our boxes with regard to how our views of our heavenly father have been formed based on misrepresentations of Him, and getting the right picture of Him based on who HE says He is.

We hear that next week is "Plumb Line"...I'm guessing my dad will know what that means - it's a term in construction where they use a string with a weight on it to determine if something is straight. We keep hearing things about how powerful the week will be...we're all a little anxious! Hehe.