Truth, Justice, and the American Way

My apologies, loyal readers. I took a vacation this week and didn't post anything. To make up for it, A Day In The Life Of An Average Guy (henceforth known as ADITLOAAG) will have not one, but two posts today. The first is serious, the second... not so much.

Let's begin.

One of my all-time favorite bands is Coheed and Cambria. They're an extremely interesting and talented group, and I highly recommend them. I enjoy their music for a variety of reasons; the backstory behind it, their distinctive sound, the melodies and rhythms. I was recently listening to a Coheed song called "When Skeletons Live", when one line of the lyrics struck me. It said, "The truth is relevant, but not for long." It really got me thinking a lot about truth, what we see as true, and what actually is true. Think about that statement a little bit. On the one hand, there are certain physical, inherent truths. Take gravity for instance. What comes up, must come down. It is the way that things are. It is true. Yet on the other hand, there are things that people have long believed to be true that turned out to be false (the concept of the Sun revolving around the Earth, for example). Now to bring it closer to home, in this day and age we are surrounded, permeated by, and bombarded with all sorts of "truths". Some are true, some are partly true, some are blatantly false. Think about the world of advertising. If every single ad that you saw on television or in a magazine portrayed the truth, companies would lose a ton of money on their products. Why? Because we as Americans don't want the truth. We'd rather have the "great American Dream". You know what I'm talking about: nice job, fast car, beautiful wife/handsome husband, two and a half kids, suburban house with a white picket fence. It's what everybody wants, right? We deserve it.

Or do we? Let me float a rather radical idea past you. We don't deserve much of anything. Actually, according to Bible, what we do deserve is death. So I think we should be thankful for not getting what we deserve. (but that's a different story).

Back to the main idea: life is not always handed to us on a silver platter. In order to discover what is true and what is false in this world, we have to have a standard to compare it to. Do you know how banks train tellers to find counterfeit money? They have them handle the real thing, over and over, until they can almost instantly tell the difference between a true bill and a false one. I propose that we take the same approach to life. In a world filled with half-truths and even outright lies, it can sometimes be a little hard to tell what is good and pure, and what isn't. Fortunately, we have a standard to compare everything to. God's Word. If you are a Christian, then you believe that every word printed in the Bible is inherently and unfailingly true. If that is correct, then we can take what we learn and read, and apply it to our daily lives. In order to find our way to the truth in this world, we need to spend time in God's Word. Read it. Pray about it. Think about it. Talk to people about it. The more time you spend in the truth, the easier it will become to spot what is false.