The Perils of Telling the Truth
I want to add to my stories about good, faithful women, today.
This is a story about someone I know well, but I am not going to use her name. You don't need to know to get the point. It is a story that needs to be told in several different ways and for different purposes. For today's purpose, it is about truth-telling.
To begin with, Jesus is the truth. Whatever truth we aspire to know is summed up and disseminated by God-with-us, the Savior risen. Therefore, truth takes spiritual discernment. It is not factless, but the facts cannot present the truth unless the truth is related to God and is therefore concerned with love. My friend has had a difficult year trying to teach truth and tell it. She has been attacked by loveless truth purporting to be fact but without discernment.
She had a hellish year, actually, at the hands of ruthless colleagues and a feckless administration at the university. Years ago, she became the chair of her department when it was falling apart. She not only righted the ship, she created one of the most effective departments on campus and was regularly told so. She became respected and chaired faculty committees. She had a vision for student development and designed a curriculum to reflect Christian principles, coming up with something of a training model that was a unique combination of science and faith.
In April of 2010 my friend came home from a trip to a funeral to find that two of her colleagues had engineered a "coup" of sorts, presenting a plan for the reorganization of the curriculum that purportedly conformed to "best practices." They justified lowering the level of training to one they could teach by suggesting that one lagging criteria of eight in test scores from a practice test given to a group of students required their revamping. Their plan amounted to truth without discernment, discernment being the hallmark of my friend's approach. What's worse, they would not talk about their reasons, their process or the now-broken trust they caused. They would only have conversation in group under carefully scripted, circumstances. The dean was brought in to mediate and my friend was subjected to a barrage of projection and invective that she had never experienced in her whole life. The conflict never went through any personal process like Matthew 18 insists; it went directly to character assassination and tribunal. So the supposed truth was accompanied by no love.
It was worse than loveless, it was abusive. As chair of the department, there was reason for the leadership of the university to exercise some camaraderie, at least. Instead they promised and fiddled and left her hung out to dry. They not only wasted the results of her talents and devotion, they diminished all her work in a department that was one of the most successful on campus (and profitable!). At one point the provost brought in a professional mediator, with whom the rebels refused to meet except under choreographed circumstances. The mediator let them dominate the hour and afterwards actually suggested my friend leave the university rather than think the situation would ever resolve. The mediator later suggested she bring cookies to a future meeting, something like Beaver's mother solving a sitcom crisis.
What might have solved my friend's problem would have been not telling the truth in the first place. She had created a program that was serious about people and demanded serious professors to train students. The professors did not want to do the personal work; they diminished the program down to the little they were willing and able to do and called it "best practices." Unfortunately, we need people to be trained by a good program; we need Christians who can deal in truth.
What's more, my friend could have fought fire with fire. Instead of fighting for the chair role, she resigned in a show of humility. Instead of putting letters of protest in the files of her colleagues, or filing a lawsuit, she allowed for reconciliation to happen. Instead of organizing her appalled friends into a league supporters, she relied on the institution to follow its rules and protect its standards. She could (and still could) tell her story and let the truth stand. Instead, she has gone through an excruciating process of figuring out how to speak the truth in love while having no partners with which to do it.
In all my days as a participant in the church I have never seen such an overt expression of wicked behavior. My friend got no regard from people she thought were her friends — people she had housed in her home, travelled with, for whom she had fought for promotions and raises, and had provided for in so many ways. I have rarely seen a leadership so befuddled and limp that they were afraid to tell the truth about their own stated vision and standards and just left a valuable leader to fend for themselves. Granted, my friend was not an experienced or even willing political player; she didn't want to be an infighter and that got her eliminated through her own audacious trust. But one would hope that there are still shepherds around who know the truth and tell it. Unfortunately it is often like Isaiah 56:10 His watchmen are all blind, they are all ignorant: dumb dogs not able to bark, seeing vain things, sleeping and loving dreams.
My friend is hurting, but she will be fine. She trusts God. She knows the truth and Jesus knows her. But will the truth be OK? Ruthless people wield pseudo-science around without discernment and ruin our schools. People who do not receive discernment from their spiritual directors and wise leaders are let loose in a so-called democratic atmosphere to steal and destroy. It is a very old story, but these days it is objectified by science and depersonalized by the spirit of self-actualization and tolerance.
I can't solve this big mess of a problem by describing it. But I can continue to protest to whoever will listen. We need to do the best we can to tell the truth. If you are a leader you are required to have the courage to tell the truth for Jesus' sake, as best you can. You'll need to risk the conflict and not just ride out the problem until it settles at the lowest common denominator.
All of us, if we have a dream or we have a problem, we need to tell the truth. That means we'll have to understand where our dreams and problems come from, and understand how we impact others. We'll need to have a purpose for the common good, not just our own, when we go for fulfillment and solution. Our truth will have to include love like the Lord's.
Most difficult of all, when I am a victim of bad science and worse leadership like my friends has been, I will have to suffer for telling the truth. Discernment is not rewarded in public anymore. It is all politics of the least relational kind.
Don't let go. We will be accused of grandiosity, but let's follow Paul's exhortation: Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, "children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation." Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life. Philippians 2:14-16
