I know this is a detour from the posts on anger, but I need to catch the blog up to speed with what has been happening during this most resent delay in posting.
As I have attempted to make progress in writing the book, I have been struggling with the need to be truthful in my accounts of my life. My struggle is best summed up with the question, what is the difference between being truthful and being honest. If you start with the assumption that telling the truth about an event means that everyone involved in the event or witnessing it would agree completely on exactly what happened, why, when, etc., then telling the truth about an event becomes an impossible task. On the other hand, if you start with the premise that telling the truth means I am giving an honest account of the event as I saw it or experienced it at the time and/or in reflecting back on the event,then it is between me, God, and my conscience to determine what a truthful account of the event really is. I can add what other people have reflected back to me about the event in order to give a broader picture, but I have been struggling to reconcile the reality that even though my perspective on the events I am writing about is an honest representation of what really happened, someone else writing about the same event might reflect a very different account of what really happened.
This has lead to an in-depth study about what the Bible has to say about the topic of truth and honesty. It doesn’t take a long look to quickly discover that God puts a high priority on telling the truth (just look at the story of Ananias and Sapphira In Acts 5:1-10) and He has a lot to say about it. There are 256 verses about truth in the Bible according to Nave’s Topical Index. I am not finished with the Bible study, but I am ready to move forward in the writing of the book as well as writing posts for this blog.