She picked me up right on time to take me from my hotel to the airport. I slid between the raindrops and into the back seat of her car. “How was your stay?” my Uber driver asked. I told her about having visited the Meijer Gardens. “Oh, you saw the butterflies!” Yes, I had. “I love butterflies,” she said. “I have butterfly tattoos!” She showed me her hand and touched her shoulder. When did you first start loving butterflies? I asked. “Oh, ever since I was a little girl. I wanted to be a butterfly, so I could fly away.”

An oft-remembered cinematic scene came to mind. Jenny and Forest Gump in the cornfield, hiding from her abusive father. Jenny asks Forest to pray with her: “Dear God, make me a bird, so I can fly far… far, far away from here.” I reminded myself that not every hint at a difficult history is an invitation to a deep conversation, so I changed the subject and asked her if she had driven much the day before – a day that had been unseasonably warm.

“Oh, I did. I drove my dad to and from a doctor’s appointment. He’s in a nursing home.” She told me more about her dad. I mentioned that I had worked as a chaplain in long term care and that now I work as a spiritual care provider in a Hospice House.

“Hospice,” she said flatly. “My grandma died with hospice. They gave her morphine. I think that’s what killed her.”

I felt myself thrum to hear this common misunderstanding and launched as gently as I could into some death education. “Well, it does seem like that’s what’s happening, but actually, the pain medication is given just to keep people comfortable as they die.”

The connection cracked between us. I’d lost her. She was quiet. In the pause, I went deeper inside and found what I needed. “But that must have been really hard – to see your grandma go from being so alive to not responding to you. I’m so sorry.”

And she was back. She told me story after story of the losses in her life and how she responded to them. Tears fell quietly down her cheeks as she told me about her faith in the God who always has a reason. And I listened with love, speaking small words of comfort and validation here and there. “I think my grandma is speaking to me through you,” she said. I wouldn’t put it past her grandma or God to have made that happen.

When we got to the airport, she asked if we could hug. I told her we most certainly could. She got out of the car as I was grabbing my suitcase. We hugged hard and she said, “I love you… Thank you.”

I share this story because in it, I experienced something true. I experienced truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says in Christ the Center, “Truth is not something in itself, which rests for itself, but something that happens between two. Truth happens only in community.”

Truth happens between two.

Truth is something that happens. It’s a verb – like the verbification of the Greek word for truth in Ephesians 4:15, which could be translated, “truthing [instead of ‘speaking the truth’] in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ.”

Truth is a person – the person of Jesus who is the one who happens between two. He is always actively in relationship – with the Creator and the Spirit and the whole universe, as all things hold lovingly together in him.

Truth happened between Jesus and Pilate the morning of Jesus’ death, when Pilate asked Jesus what truth was anyway. “Truth itself cannot be stated,” Fredrick Buechner writes in Telling the Truth, reflecting on Pilate’s question.

Truth simply is, and is what is, the good with the bad, the joy with the despair, the presence and absence of God, the swollen eye, the bird pecking the cobbles for crumbs. Before it is a word, the Gospel that is truth is silence, a pregnant silence in its ninth month, and in answer to Pilate’s question, Jesus keeps silent, even with his hands tied behind him manages somehow to hold silence out like a terrible gift.

Truth happens between two. Truth happened between me and my Uber driver as she told her story from her heart. And truth happened between her and her grandmother, in their shared life on this earth and perhaps between here and the life beyond.

I am thankful for the Truth that is broader and deeper and more loving than the truth-about-morphine-drips and that this space at the Reformed Journal is also a community where truth happens. Let’s keep truthing in love.

Header Image Photo by kabita Darlami on Unsplash