On the Trail of the Truth

by Michael Phillips

  He stopped, opened up his Bible, then went on. “Let me read to you what the Bible calls truth. In John, Jesus says, ‘I am the truth.’ He doesn’t say that such-and-such an idea, or a certain set of statements or facts are the truth, he says that he is the truth.

  “Do you remember when I said that truth means different things to different people? Let me show you two people in the Bible to whom truth meant completely different things. In the eighteenth chapter of John, after Jesus had told his disciples that he was the truth, Jesus stands trial before Pilate, and he again brings up the subject of truth. Jesus says to him, ‘Every one that is of the truth hears my voice.’ And then Pilate asks one of the most profound questions in all of the Bible. He says to Jesus, ‘What is truth?’—the very question we’re examining this morning.

  “Can you get a picture of these two people in your minds—Pilate and Jesus—both talking about truth?

  “But they mean very different things by the word. When Pilate asks ‘What is truth?’ he is asking for a set of ideas, facts, opinions—just like the list of statements we talked about. Pilate wants Jesus to tell him what facts and ideas comprise what he calls ‘truth.’ But Jesus gives him no answer. Jesus says nothing. Why doesn’t Jesus answer him?”

  Rev. Rutledge paused a moment.

  “Jesus doesn’t answer him because truth is not at all what Pilate thinks it is. There are no ideas that would make up what Pilate calls truth. Not even any religious ones.

  “What is the truth, Pilate wants to know. Jesus himself is the truth, and he is standing right in front of Pilate. Pilate has the truth but doesn’t know it!

  “In other words, the truth is a person, but Pilate wants mere ideas. And even true ideas, even correct facts, are not the truth. ‘The sky is blue today’ is a correct statement of fact. But it is not a truth. Only a person can be true.”

  Rev. Rutledge stopped again, and took in a deep breath. I was concentrating hard to understand what he was saying.

  “I hope I’ve made myself clear,” he said, “about the difference between truths and facts, and about the contrast between Jesus and Pilate. I know I’ve gone on a long time, but there’s one more very important point I must make. If I don’t say this one last thing, then my whole sermon may mean nothing to you. My whole sermon could amount to nothing more than just a nice set of ‘ideas’ that I have given you, without there being any truth in it.

  “So, here is my final point: Jesus is not the only person who can be of the truth. So can you and I!”

  Again he stopped to let his words sink in.

  “Jesus said that everyone who is of the truth hears his voice. In other words, Jesus is the truth, but others—people like you and me, people who hear his voice and obey him—we can be of the truth. Jesus is the first truth, but we can be of the truth if we follow him and do as he did.”

  As I pondered Rev. Rutledge’s words afterward, what he said next was the thing that stood out most in my mind. “Truth is people and how they live. If we want to be of the truth, like Jesus said, it’s in how we live and what we do, not in what we think about ideas and facts. Someone sitting right here this morning—one of you in this church building—may have been mistaken in all five of those statements I gave. You might have missed every one. Yet you might be more an of-the-truth person than another one sitting here who got every answer correct—if that person with all the wrong answers went out and lived the truth by what kind of person he was—lived following Jesus’ example.

  “Was Pilate a true man?

  “After asking ‘What is truth?’ what did he do? Knowing Jesus was innocent, knowing the charges against him were lies, and even admitting that he could find nothing wrong in him—knowing all this, Pilate still gave Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified. Pilate may have wondered what truth was, but he was not a ‘true’ man. He did not stand up for what he knew to be right. He was weak. He was not of the truth.”

  The minister paused again, took a breath as he closed his Bible, and went on.

  “Truth is not ideas, not even religious ideas, not even Christian ideas, not even correct ideas. Truth is life, not thoughts. Truth is a person. That person is Jesus. And he wants us to be of the same truth as he is—by how we live.

  “As Christians we are to be true people. Jesus was of the truth. Pilate was not. Jesus is the truth. Pilate wanted ideas, but was not a strong enough person to live truthfully.

  “Each of us has to make the choice which of these two men we are going to be like. How are we going to live? By the truth or not? Who is going to be our example? Are we going to live truth, or only think and talk about it?”

  Chapter 16

  A Talk About Growth

  It probably seems like I was forever taking walks and thinking and writing in my journal about what was going on in my mind.

  But I did also try to write down things I was doing—however, the most important thing about life to me was what was going on inside me. Maybe it isn’t this way for everyone, but I liked to try to figure out the meanings behind things. When I read a book, I think about what the author said, and I like to read for the ideas as much as the story. I reckon that’s why I liked Mr. Thoreau so much. There was hardly any story in Walden but it was full of ideas that made me think.

  Maybe that’s why I wanted to be a writer, so I could think on paper, and so I could get to know other people and find out what they were thinking and write down their ideas for others to get to know too.

  Ever since I began keeping my journal and started learning more about what it really meant to live as a Christian, something inside me wanted to grow, to learn, to stretch and think and explore and be more than I was. I wanted the inside part of me to get bigger so it could hold more. Thinking and talking to God and reading and writing down my thoughts and feelings in my journal were all ways to stretch and enlarge that deep-down part of me and make it grow.

  Almeda and I talked once about growth. I told her this feeling I had inside about wanting to stretch that inside part of me, and to be more than I was.

  She thought for a long time, and then said that she felt the process of growth inside each person’s heart and mind was one of the greatest gifts God has given to us.

  “There is nothing in all the world,” she said, “quite so wonderful as an individual soul expanding, reaching out, coming awake to itself, to its Maker, to other souls around it. The awakening of the soul, then its growth and development, then its reaching out to touch other souls that are similarly growing along the same journey—there is hardly anything in all of life so wonderful.”

  Her voice became quiet and her eyes misted over.

  “Like you and me?” I suggested.

  “I think so, Corrie,” she replied in a soft tone. “I truly think so.”

  “What makes some people want to grow like that, and others content just to stay where they are?” I asked.

  “That’s a huge question, Corrie! Who could possibly know the answer to that?” she laughed.

  “Is it because some people are made to be thinkers?”

  “People like you, I take it you mean?”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “You know what I mean,” I said. “Not everybody keeps journals and thinks about everything like I do.”

  “Maybe people should think more.”

  “But I figured God made some folks to be thinkers and others not to be. Isn’t everyone different?”

  “That’s true. But I have the feeling God wants everybody to think, though maybe in different ways and to different degrees. It has nothing to do with being smart, but with using the brain you do have. The book of Proverbs, the whole of Scripture really, is full of urgings and promptings to learn and understand. One of my favorites is ‘Apply your heart to understand, incline your ear to wisdom.’ That sounds to me as if God meant for every person in the world to try diligently to understand things, and to get wisdom. It also says to seek for wisdom like silver, and to search for it like hidden treasures. That sounds
to me like we’re supposed to think!”

  “It sure doesn’t seem as if everybody thinks like that. Or at least they don’t talk about it so you’d know.”

  “Most people don’t think, Corrie, not like God wants them to. They aren’t searching for wisdom and applying themselves to understand, and that’s why not even very many people who call themselves Christians are growing as they could be.”

  “You mean you can’t grow if you’re not thinking about everything?”

  “No, that’s not it exactly.” She paused and thought for a little bit. “Let me try to explain it another way,” she said finally. “To grow, I would say—yes, you do have to apply yourself to understand, and you have to search and pray for wisdom, just like the Bible says. Both those things imply not only prayer but also a lot of thought. And if you’re not doing those things, your thinking and growth and wisdom muscles, so to speak, are going to lose their power to think and grow. If you don’t use a muscle, it gets weak. In the same way, if you don’t think and make an effort to grow and, as Proverbs says, apply yourself to understand, then pretty soon you won’t be able to, and you will stop growing. You become capable of thinking by thinking. You become capable of growing by growing. And thus you grow as a Christian . . . by growing. And certainly thinking and praying and searching for wisdom are all part of that process.

  “But growth isn’t only a matter of thinking—most important of all is the doing that goes along with the thinking. Thinking all by itself won’t stretch that inside part of you. It won’t make you bigger inside, won’t draw you closer to God, won’t make you more than you are now, as you said. The real growth comes after the thinking, when you live what you’ve been thinking about. The growth comes when we do what God wants us to.

  “In other words, Corrie, it’s a process that has two parts. First we have to try to understand, we have to search and pray for wisdom. But then after that, as the second part, we have to live out what our understanding has shown us. We have to do what Jesus says. We have to put others first, we have to be kind and do good, speak pleasantly and behave with courtesy and trust God and pray, and do all those things Jesus told us to do. That’s the active part of getting understanding and wisdom.

  “There’s the thinking part and the doing part. And growth only happens when both are at work in your life together. That’s how the inside part of you, the real you down in your heart, will stretch and grow, and will always be becoming more than it was the day before.”

  Chapter 17

  A Walk in the Woods

  After the church service, I needed time alone to try to understand Rev. Rutledge’s sermon more clearly. I had a feeling God might have more meaning for me in his words than I could know just from sitting in the church. I had to think about it some more.

  So I told Pa and the others to go on ahead home without me. I’d walk back in a while. Then I went out into the woods behind the church, the same woods where Becky’d gotten lost. On the way as I walked, the conversation I’d had with Almeda about growth came back to me, and I found both her words and those of the minister mingling in my mind, trying to sort themselves out.

  As all of it was tumbling through my mind—living truth instead of just thinking about it, growth, understanding, wisdom, the thinking kind of person I was, everything Almeda had said about growth and doing and Proverbs—it came to me how important all of it was if I was going to be a writer.

  You couldn’t even write the five w’s without being able to think and understand things, I thought to myself, because one of them was why. So if you were going to write, you’d have to think and understand!

  Then I found myself thinking, not just about the kinds of writing that Mr. Kemble had talked about, but about why I wanted to write in the first place. At first it had just started with journal writing. I had only needed to express myself, to think out loud.

  But now I realized there was more to it. I still liked to think on paper—whether in my journal or in something I was trying to write. But now that I thought about it in light of Rev. Rutledge’s and Almeda’s words, I found myself realizing that I wanted my writing to amount to something more than just writing. I wanted it to mean something, even though I’d never really stopped to think about it before.

  Then I found myself reflecting back on that early morning walk I had taken just before the blizzard began, when God had shown me so many things and when I had prayed about my future. I recalled how on that day I had thought about the truth too, and had felt God telling me to find the truth and to follow it and live by it and be fed by it. The scripture I had thought about that morning came vividly back to me: In truth shall you be fed, and so shall you dwell in the land.

  Suddenly it all made so much more sense!

  The truth was so much bigger than just giving a factual account of the five w’s. Anybody could do that. That was the Pontius Pilate side, the facts, the statements, the lists of ideas that might be half correct and half wrong. That might be “reporting,” but that wasn’t what I wanted to spend my life doing.

  I wanted to grow—in understanding, in wisdom . . . in truth.

  And I wanted my writing to be true. Not just with correct facts, with the five w’s—though that might be part of it too. But true like Rev. Rutledge talked about truth—true to the kind of person I was, true to the Bible, true to the man who was truth—Jesus, God’s Son. I wanted my writing to point to the truth, to be of the truth. I wanted it to make people think and help them to grow. Even if I was writing a story about something other than Jesus, who was the truth, I wanted how I said it to make people think in a true way, not a Pontius Pilate sort of way. I wanted people like Katie, who didn’t believe in spiritual things, to read my writing and think in a little more of a true way. Katie herself had said, after my article about her, that she could never think about the apple tree in quite the same way after reading what I wrote. Well, maybe if I could get her thinking about apple trees and people and roots in a true way, someday that might lead her to think about God in a more true way too.

  That’s what I wanted my writing to be able to do, even when I was writing about something that didn’t have anything to do with God on the surface.

  I remembered the verse Rev. Rutledge had quoted in church just a little while ago, the words Jesus had said: “Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice.”

  “Help me, God, to hear your voice,” I prayed. “I want to hear your voice so that I can grow and understand. I want to hear your voice so I will know your wisdom, and so that what I write will be true.”

  I was deep in the woods now, the church and all the buildings of the town long out of sight.

  I stopped and dropped to my knees among the decaying leaves and dead pine needles of the forest floor. I clasped my hands and closed my eyes.

  “Oh, Lord,” I prayed aloud, “make me a true person! When I hear your voice, give me strength to do what you say. Give me your wisdom and your understanding. Be the guide to my thoughts, God, and then help me to do what you want me to. Make my life be a true life, so that my writing will be of the truth.”

  I drew in a deep sigh, and my nostrils filled with the fragrance of the forest. It was such a lovely smell, and I couldn’t help thinking right in that moment that God had made it only for me. It reminded me all over again how much he loved me.

  Me—just me! The God of the universe loved little me, Corrie Belle Hollister!

  Almeda had been telling me that simple truth for three years, and now I really grasped it on my own. Now maybe it was my turn to find ways to begin telling other people the same thing, as she had told me.

  I stood and turned around and began retracing my steps out of the woods. Everywhere I looked were the signs of growth, from the fresh buds on the tips of the pine branches to the shrubs and undergrowth of the forest. Overhead the early afternoon sun poured through in tiny rays split into millions of arrows by the infinite, green needles on the trees.

  I had always loved the woods, the m
ountains, the streams, the sky, the clouds. Yet the older I grew the more alive it all became to me. Every time I went out alone something new revealed itself to my consciousness. This was not the first time I had walked in this pine wood. But I think it was dearer to me on this day than it had ever been before. The mystery of its loveliness was somehow almost sacred. From the church building that the men of Miracle Springs had built, I had stepped into God’s presence itself—into his greater, living church. All about me were signs and reflections of God himself, things he had made.

  And as I left the wood that afternoon I found myself wondering about the truth contained in the trees and the bushes and the grass, even the truth of the blue sky and the sunshine and the smells I so enjoyed. Were all these things “true,” as a man or woman might also be “true,” because they came out of God, and reflected part of his nature?

  That was far too big a question for my mind! I thought about it all the way home, and was no nearer to figuring it out than when I left town.

  Chapter 18

  New Times Come to Miracle Springs

  By the time I got back to the claim, the afternoon was half gone and it was snowing again. Not real snow—it was toward the end of May, and though snow that late wouldn’t have been out of the question higher up in the mountains, down in the foothills where we lived it would have been close to impossible.

  A storyteller might call it snowing “figuratively.” Sometimes a writer says something that has more than one meaning, like the apple tree when I was telling about Katie. So when I say it was snowing, I mean that God had already begun to answer my prayers again, my prayers about wanting to be true and to write in a true way. Like the last time, when it was really snowing, I didn’t recognize the things that happened as God’s little answering snowflakes coming down into my life.