Manson's Memo - Inconvenient Truths

A film currently showing in theaters around us is An Inconvenient Truth. In that film, Al Gore (“I used to be the next president of the United States.�) explains about global warming – a serious environmental issue that involves the whole world. While there may be some room to debate parts of the film, I would encourage you to see it and judge for yourselves about the issue.

The title for the film deals with the idea that there are some truths that we don’t want to know because we have an interest in not knowing. The former Vice President tells of his father, who grew tobacco on their family farm. Even after the Surgeon General issued various warnings about smoking, the elder Senator Gore kept growing tobacco. The truth about tobacco was inconvenient, so he was able to overlook it, or look at it only from an economic perspective. Of course, that changed when his daughter died of lung cancer. The truth, as inconvenient as it may have been, had to be dealt with.

Our lives are full of inconvenient truths. Not just things like global warming, but personal things that we just don’t want to confront. Maybe something relatively minor, like the funny noise our car makes. But sometimes it can be very important – all the way up to confronting our mortality.

In the Gospel According to John, Jesus says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.� To be a follower of Christ means we need not fear inconvenient truth. Rather we should welcome them because the more we try to hide from those truths, the more we are enslaved by them. It is only be facing our truths (with the one who is Truth beside us) that we can be set free.

שלןמ

(shalom)