Tuesday, March 20, 2018

No such thing as an article for all persons and all seasons

Photo by Tina Rataj-Berard on Unsplash

God was doing business in me recently when I had to realise something well beyond my control. In 400-words I cannot satisfy all His truth; I can only hit one angle.
Most books cannot cover all the territory the author would want to cover.
The concern came in how I lead others in understanding how acceptance comes through the process of grief. Within a few weeks I wrote two articles[1] that could seem to contradict each other. God made me aware of this having written the second one — He gave it to me to wrestle.
Having wrestled, the key issue is they both, individually, reflect different truth — two different persons’ truth. In this case, as far as recovery from grief is concerned, two people’s responses are polar different. The first one experiences no immediate recovery to acceptance, and suffers for a decade or longer, grieving at times traumatically. The other has the opposite experience: tragically loses a child, yet, having grieved for a time, has an epiphany that reduces all the sorrow to meaning. It seems for the one, that God hasn’t stepped in, yet for the other He has. I do not think in such terms, though.
Both responses to grief are equally valid because they’re both real case scenarios lived out by real people.
The conflict I experience in writing what God lays on my heart is the torment at times that I’m leading people wrongly. In writing about one perspective of truth, people are bound to read these words in the absolute sense — like the truth I write is the only truth. It is truth, just not all the truth; just one sliver of truth within myriads.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seriously considered giving up writing, and the many times I’m made such an attempt. But either God goaded me back or other people did. I certainly cannot stop. The Lord speaks too much to be ignored. He has chosen this medium for me. (Like it’s taken only 19 minutes to write this… and still He’s speaking…)
This article is an attempt to reconcile how I feel about the possibility that I may have betrayed the reader.

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