The truth

When I was in the seventh grade, I played junior high football, or rather, I was on a team. I didn't play. I made up for my lack of size with my lack of speed. I was a running back by choice, not talent. One time, the coach put me at wing back (a position out on the flanks of the offensive line, a step off that line) and ran a reverse in which the quarterback handed the ball to the running back who went right and then handed it to me as I ran left.

They said later you could have timed that play with a sun dial. Fast? I wasn't.

I was skinny, short, everything a football player, even a seventh-grader, should not necessarily be. I loved the game, what I knew of it, from recess in the fifth and sixth grade where my heart and my head were my biggest assets. I would take the ball and run fearlessly into a pile and push my way for yards. So everyone said that when we went out for junior high football, I would make a good running back. I believed everyone. Everyone was wrong with a capital W that didn't stand for wins.

At one game, one of the few my parents attended, I was sitting on the bench, looking particularly forlorn. My mother picked up on that, as she would every mood I was ever in, and crept down to the sideline to ask me what was wrong. Frozen, with my mother talking to me on the bench as teammates played the game ahead of me, I mumbled that my shoes had been stolen and I had borrowed a pair that were too small. I couldn't run in them, I told her.

It was, as I might call it now, a lie. A non-truth. A white lie. A little bitty one.

I had left my shoes at home and I had, er, borrowed the pair closest to my feet of someone on the ninth grade team, someone with small dang feet I might ad. I had told the same lie to my coach, who felt sorry for me, but wouldn't play me even the little I usually got to play because I ran like some sort of large river beast on land.

One of the lines of scripture I love most (I write that a lot, I've noticed) is when Jesus and Pilate are having a conversation it goes like this: ³⁷ “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” ³⁸ “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

Truth is what the whole idea of Jesus is about, it seems to me. I have trouble with people wanting to pick apart the Gospels, pointing out what they perceive to be errors or mistakes or inconsistencies. There is a whole cottage industry of publishing for those folks. I am not smart enough to be a debater of such.

What I know is this: If one pulls layer upon layer of truth away from the Gospels, at the end one does to find a lie, one finds Jesus, the Jesus, the truth, the way, the life. I believe that enough to die for it. With my shoes on or off.to