June 5, 2024
When I was a little girl, growing
up with a mother who worked full time and was a single parent, there was one
lesson above all lessons that was impressed upon me. Breaking the rules was
bad, yes. But nothing was worse than lying about it, after.
One might commit one sin or
another and could expect a punishment that fit that crime; add lying to the
mix, and God help you!
One might take something that was
not one’s own to have, and that would be bad enough. That would most definitely
earn a punishment. But lying about it when asked?
As a preteen child and then a
teen, that was a fate I did not even want to contemplate.
And as far as I knew, the rest
of the world felt the very same way. There was no epithet one could earn, in
the world I knew growing up, that could possibly be worse than liar.
The way that the lesson on the
horror of lying was imparted verbally to me was this: once you told one lie,
you would inevitably have to tell another to cover up the first. And then
another, and another…..pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to remember anything
you had said because while it’s difficult to forget the truth, lies, on the
other hand, are an entirely different sort of entity altogether.
Different metaphors were
employed over the course of my pre-teen and teen years: a lie was a snowball
racing down the hill with the power and danger of an avalanche; a lie was a
fiery pit of hellfire opening and widening until all would be consumed. I truly
dreaded having to walk through life with a huge flashing sign proclaiming liar
hung around my neck—or above my head—depending. And the way my mother spoke the
word, liar, told me that if it lay on the sidewalk before me, I sure as hell
wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it, let alone step in it.
The necessity for honesty and
truth was ground into me, and to this day, of the list of things that I simply
cannot and will not abide is lying liars who lie. I hate lying above all else.
It’s a real deal breaker test for me.
The astute among you will
begin to understand, then, why it is that I have been struggling to make sense lately
of this world in which we are living.
All sorts of snippets and maxims
have floated through my mind as I began to write this essay today. Wise sayings
like, “if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything” and, “if you
don’t have your word, you have nothing.”
I have long adhered to the
idea that the purpose of life is not to hand us a good time, but to help us grow.
And then, as we are learning and growing, every once in a while, we’re
presented with a test. A great, important test that holds more significance than
we could possibly even imagine.
Never have I felt more
strongly that this is the case for us all, here and now. We are all being
tested, I swear it, and I have a feeling that fewer of us are going to ace this
latest exam than we would, all of us, like.
Another concept comes to mind,
as well, and it’s one that, as parents, most of us used in the performance of
our duty to raise our children. You corrected them, over and over and over,
because if you didn’t, they would eventually become ungovernable. If you didn’t,
they would never learn how to distinguish between right and wrong.
My friends, I tell you truly
that the difference between telling the truth and telling lies is the
difference between right and wrong.
Some of those folks I see on my
television screen who proclaim to be Christian appear not to understand that as
they portray themselves as good, stalwart believers in the Holy Bible standing before
the podium as they rail on and on, that by their very actions in that moment they
are showing themselves to be anything but Christ-like.
Don’t tell me the Holy Bible
forms your world view and governs your actions when you cannot even follow all
ten of God’s commandments.
To those who do that I say,
please stop. You are mocking the very Word I do my best to live by. It’s
shameful behavior. Yes, of course, God will
indeed forgive His children when they err. That was His promise to us, and He
always keeps His promises.
But then, by virtue of their
being His children, He knows that they would never intentionally use His
promise as a free pass to, with premeditation, break any of His commandments. Not the first. Not the second. And certainly
not the ninth.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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