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 Forrest 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
15 Responses
Oh yes, thank you. Truth between two, like the Lord Jesus and the Woman at the Well (“Spirit and Truth”). And like “troth,” as Jim Olthuis reminded us long ago (I Pledge You My Troth).
Yes! I was thinking of that as well – the expression of different truths in different types of relationships and relating. The truth/troth of a marriage happens differently than the truth of a parent-child relationship, or a friendship, or a professional relationship, etc. It’s a rich and interesting way to think about human (and human-divine!) connections.
Heidi, this is so incredibly beautiful! Thank you! I will carry it with me.
Thank you! You write clearly from one side of a centuries-old divide among Reformed folk. Some will say truth is a set of propositions that need to be proclaimed and applied. Others, that truth is emergent within a life-giving and -sustaining relationship with Jesus Christ. For decades we in the RCA heard the mantra “You can’t sacrifice truth for unity!” from the “orthodox” camp, and “we live into the truth by cultivating a unity – even if it’s messy”, from the more inclusive camp. In rare moments, the two would meet, and discover, well, truth-as-encounter. The way forward is always to keep talking, in forums like this one. Again, thank you.
So good, Heidi, so good! Thank you for reminding us that listening and responding with love is a special kind of truth that God calls us to. In our noisy and often obnoxious culture, some of us just talk too much!
A hearty amen! Your words and that quote from Bonhoeffer (one of my favorites) will fit perfectly in my “systematic” theology book that I’m nearly completing, tentatively entitled “Our Relational God.” Actually, the whole book will just be part one. I have the Bonhoeffer book, and I just found that quote on page 50 (in the edition I have).
Beautiful, encouraging, heat-warning. Thank you, Heidi, for sharing this moving account of your “truthing” with an Uber driver!
Yes!
Lovely.
Thank you, Heidi, for making truth happen between you and the reader through this touching story, and we are blessed.
Thank you, Heidi, for this reminder and affirmation that some of our deepest and most meaningful conversations occur during moments when we are suddenly tossed together with a complete stranger. I experience these now and then when I go to Costco for my weekly hot dog―I know, but if you’re Dutch, at $1.60 the hot dog is still the cheapest lunch in town. The store deli in Costco is always so busy you inevitably end up having to share a table with others.
Last week I sat with a husband and wife; he was a retired pastor who still preaches in his church. He told me he often asks parishioners what themes they would like him to preach about, and he said the last request was from a woman who asked him to preach about forgiveness. We ended up having a deep conversation about the subject, and whether the person who had hurt you needs to have repented in order for you to forgive them. She said, yes, they need to repent first; I took the opposite position. We traded Scripture verses, Lew Smedes’ book on forgiveness, and principles of psychology. Not the conversations you hear from tables around you in Costco.
Yesterday I sat at a table with an elderly couple, Vicky and George, recent immigrants to Canada I could tell by their accents. I asked them where they were from and they said, Armenia. I had to have them verify that Armenia was located where I thought it was. We ended up having a deep conversation what their immigrant experience in Canada was like, and how theirs compared to mine. About having to learn to speak English. About what they did for a living. George told me he worked as a tool and die operator. I saw little opening for a conversation there, but I made sure to ask Vicky as well. Turned out she loved music, and played the organ in their church. To illustrate, she began to softly sing a Bach choral piece. We ended up having an interesting conversation about church hymns we loved to sing. Again, not a typical conversation you hear around you in Costco.
We were about to leave, and Vicky said Costco was very busy, as usual.
“Yes,” I said, “Costco’s a license to print money.” We laughed, and went our separate ways.
Heidi, thanks so much for telling us about this beautiful encounter. The idea that truth happens between two really struck me hard, and I think I’m going to be pondering it for a while.
This was beautiful and poignant. Thank you, Heidi.
Beautiful. Thank you, Heidi! The story brings it home so much better than any essay. Thanks for sharing and for trusting your (spirit-led) instinct. It is not enough to be right. If there is to be any glory to God, we must be right for the right reason.
Yes, indeed, to relational truth. That verse “Where two or three are gathered, there Am I… in the midst” comes to mind. Thank you, Pastor Heidi, for this reminder. And for the Bonhoeffer quote.