Happy New Year, everyone!!
As the year comes to a close, the Oxford Dictionary has chosen their word of the year. This word is post-truth, which is an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ Oxford says the word post-truth belongs to “a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant.” In other words, the 2016 word of the year says truth has become unimportant or irrelevant to the majority of people today.
We read that sophisticated definition and either sigh with acknowledgement of how fallen our world is or we laugh to ourselves as we nervously try to decide if we have slid the wayward way of our ignoramus neighbors to whom the definition refers.
It’s not hard for us to think of someone we know who fits this definition. You know, that person who bases all her decisions on what she feels in the current moment, that parent who defends his child based purely on emotion rather than the facts presented, or that guy who posts all his political beliefs on social media with only emotion to back up his opinion. We know. We see them all the time. In fact, sad as it may be, the celebration of post-truth as the word of the year probably doesn’t come as a surprise to most of us.
But it’s talking about other people, not us. Right? Well, I’m not so sure.
Even in the Christian world, I think our decisions and explanations are starting to lean towards post-truth. For example, it’s okay to not make time for God because we are so busy that we don’t feel like we have time. It’s okay for us to pass by the homeless people in our city and return to our heaters and hot cocoa because they’re probably on drugs anyway. Kids are allowed to change their gender, because they don’t “feel” like a boy or a girl anymore. It’s okay to waste our time on videogames and Netflix and Facebook because the fake reality they portray is much more appealing to us than a life with the Holy Spirit who might actually challenge our conceptions about our lives.
We are changing our theology to meet our circumstances, rather than raising our theology to meet our conviction.
Please do not put words in my mouth that I have not said. I am not condemning anyone for anything I mentioned. I am not judging anyone who sins in a way differently than I do, and I have struggled with many of these things.
However, I will humbly challenge you to reevaluate your life with the standard that you should be using: the Bible. Everyone will stand before the judgment seat of God, and His standard will not be Facebook or how much better you were than your neighbor, but Christ. His standard will be the nails driven into the hands of a spotless lamb on a hill named Cavalry two thousand years ago. His standard will be whether you cared for the widows and the orphans and kept yourself from being polluted from the world.
Emotion does not equate to truth, and circumstance should not affect our belief system. God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He hasn’t changed because your circumstances have. He hasn’t changed because your friends’ beliefs have. He hasn’t changed because you can’t feel Him as much as you felt Him last month. He has not changed, and He will not change. We have.
When are we going to wake up and realize that we were made, even predestined, to stand apart in this world? Why should we believe in a post-truth reality when we have the way, the truth, and the life living inside of us? How dare we succumb to feeling our truth when real truth exists?
“Truth is relative,” they say. “There is some truth in everything,” they say. Is there? Because that’s not what the Bible says. Scripture says Jesus is the only way to the Father, and no one gets to Him except through Christ.
Oh, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? If we believe that Jesus is the ultimate truth, then we might actually have to start living like it. We might have to get off our high horses and take a humble look at the world in chaos around us. Who knows? We might even look at the world long enough to change part of it.
His standard has always been truth, not feelings and not appeals to emotion. Truth. And that truth is that Jesus died for you, for all the sins you’ve committed and all the sins you’re ever going to commit. Truth is that while Christ has given us great freedom, there also comes with it a responsibility and a stewardship that many Christians today feel quite ready to deny and ignore. Truth is living according to the love you have for God when your emotions don’t match what you know in your head to be true.
I don’t want to live in a post-truth world. I want to live in a world where truth exists. And guess what? It does. Maybe we should start living like it.
UPDATES
As for ministry updates, we spent the past week in Quito, Ecuador, working through IncaLink to serve a school called Camp Hope.
This school is a wonderful institution that serves children with different kinds of disabilities. While some of the children come for the day and simply attend school there, seventeen of the kids are orphans, with some even being found in the trash.
I worked with a teacher and her class for the week. In the beginning, things were a little rough. Even though I’ve worked with many disability programs in the past, I had never spent all day with children who lacked basic communication, eating, and bathroom skills. It was overwhelming.
But by the end of the week, I had fallen in love with my class. God gave me His eyes to see the children the way He does, and I cannot wait to talk and run and laugh with all of them in heaven someday. We are not allowed to post photos of the kids, but I took this one holding a girl’s hand during one of the Christmas performances.
In addition, we lived with 18 girls from one of the Gap Year Squads, so we got to spend Christmas with them and have some great time in community. I expected to babysit a bunch of immature girls straight out of high school, and was instead blown away by their servant hearts, their generosity, their love, and their passion for Christ. It was they who taught me, not the other way around.
Plus, Madison did some awesome henna on my arm!
I am so incredibly grateful we got to spend Christmas with the gappers, as they showed me so much more of who God is. But we parted ways shortly after Christmas, and now my team and I are about five hours away in a town called Loreto.
Here we are doing ministry with a local church building a foundation for a school where the church teaches children English, evangelizing in door-to-door ministry, hanging out with the pastor and his family, doing some ATL (ask the Lord), and speaking at the church during their services.
We are here for the next twelve days, and then the squad will meet back up again to travel to Cusco, Peru, where we will hike Machu Picchu and have a debrief. I am splitting up from the squad with Hannah and Kaitlyn (team 3125 reunion!) and taking a trip to Lima where I will get to meet my little girl I sponsor through Compassion International. I’m sure there will be a whole blog post about that, as it may be one of the best days of my life so far. I’m so excited!!
And since I finally have some solid Internet (at a fro yo shop – woah), here are some photos from Ecuador so far.
We ended up being in Baños (the adventure capital of Ecuador) for an extra week longer than we originally thought. So I did a few fun things.
I went canyoning (repelling down waterfalls).
I jumped off one of the highest bridges I’ve seen.
I played with a llama.
I found my spirit horse and galloped up a mountain.
I visited Quilotoa, the westernmost volcano (caldera) in the Ecuadorian Andes.
I got to swing on the swing at the end of the world.
I got to meet an Ecuadorian Santa.
And so much more that there are no pictures to tell! Ecuador has been my favorite country so far, and I can’t wait to see all that God still has in store. Thank you for praying for me and loving me always, everyone. God is doing big things!
I am continuing on with my video fast, so there are only two videos I have edited since I stopped filming things. They are attached below.
Prayer requests:
-Please pray God continues to guide my team in growing closer to each other and serving the people around us fully
-Please pray God continues to keep our hearts fully open, aware of how He wants to change us, and willing to make the sacrifice to live in dependence and obedience
-Please pray for the community in Quito, for the children of Camp Hope, and for the community of Loreto
-Please pray for our brothers and sisters on the Gap J Squad who are now headed to India for three months
-Please pray for Nick Buford, one of the guys on my squad. After going to the hospital three times, they finally diagnosed him with Hepatitis A. Please pray for healing and wisdom in this time for him, his team, and his family
-Please pray for my team and our squad for our ability to stay present and to wake up and choose to say yes to our circumstances each day. As we approach the halfway point of the Race, many of us are looking to the future, future jobs, and returning to the comforts of America, but there is much more work to do.
-Please pray for continued safety in travel and in our daily lives. I do not believe we are called to live safe lives, but I am still aware of the greater risk I am in daily because of the work I am doing
-Please get off this computer and go pray for the world, yourself, and the part God has for you to play in it. You have a destiny, and it will not be fulfilled unless you fight for it. Fight the good fight, and cling to truth.
Thank you and with love always,
Tera
