Speaking The Truth In Love

It Involves Way More Than "Positive Regard"

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying
With that sweet moon
Language
What every other eye in the world
Is dying to
Hear.
—Hafiz

A friend asked me recently what I thought he should do about a new transgendered woman who had started coming to his church. “He’s a man,” said my friend. “I don’t want to call him ‘she.’ And what if she comes to our Christian school? My kids go there. I don't want the school teachers to give into his demands to be recognized as a woman. That's not what my kids have been taught to believe.”

I thought what it must be like for this person—the confusion and pain that must've defined her childhood, the relentless discomfort of never feeling like she belongs in the body she had, the immense sexual confusion all that must have produced, and even now, after all the surgeries, the knowledge that she still could not—would never—“pass” as a woman in society, even though that's what she believed she was. And here she is, daring to show her face in a church, where no one looks like her, desperately seeking for some corner of normalcy in her life, some place to belong, even a little.

So of course, in that moment with my friend, I saw only one meaningful answer to his question: “You must love her,” I said. “You must love her as if she were your own flesh and blood.”

“But I don't agree at all with what he's done to himself. I can't condone his beliefs. If he demands I bow to his worldview, I can't do it. I won't pretend I'm okay with it.”

“All right,” I said. “Let's assume you're right about all of that. Let's assume he's deceived and confused and is wrong about everything he's done, every choice he's made regarding his body and his sexuality. How would you begin to even attempt to rescue him from the grip of this horrible deception? The answer is still the same.”

“You must love her,” I repeated. “You must love her as if she were your own flesh and blood.”

I said this, of course, knowing full well that if he truly did love her in this way, he, too, would be changed—probably even more profoundly than she would.

We Christians toss around the phrase, “speaking the truth in love,” like it's a Divine permission slip to tell strangers what you really think of them so long as you do it nicely. But in doing so I think we grossly misunderstand the depth of that teaching. If “the truth” someone needs to hear is like a life raft floating on the open sea, then love is the ocean you must swim to reach it on their behalf. “In love” means swimming in an ocean of love for that person; it means being well and truly in love with them before you speak a single word of corrective truth to them. Love is the only context from which a follower of Jesus can speak God’s truth—and by “love,” I don't mean mere cordiality or even positive regard; I mean wholehearted, gutsy, rigorous love, a love that costs you something, a love that forces you to lay down your armor and bare your heart in vulnerable openness, willing to be injured or belittled on behalf of the other person because their freedom matters more to you than your own comfort and security. 

Why such a high bar? Because that is the bar set by Christ himself. That is precisely the kind of love Jesus offered to the world on the cross, and continues to offer to us today. If we want the right to speak into someone's life, first we have to be in their life. We have to love them, sometimes for a long time, before any “truth” we want to offer can really bear fruit. And often, we made find that the truth that’s offered ends up being for us instead.