“We all eat untruths when our hearts are hungry.”

I got that line from The Old Try. Check out what these Mississippi expats are up to. I love their work.

Ever since I read that line, it has haunted me.

There is a leanness inherent in the human soul. We come into the world missing a crucial component of our lives. A void, if you will.

From birth forward, your life is a pilgrimage, a quest to fill that void. Or, to quote the great philosophers Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” The path of least resistance dictates that we find the easy answers to challenges. No one wants to stress themselves out looking for the truth, now do they?

When our hearts are hungry, then, we flail around, trying to fill the void.

If there’s any lessons I’ve learned from the last few months, it’s that people are hurting and searching. They want answers.

Sometimes, though, the answers based in truth are contrary to the beliefs they’ve held.

I think about this. I mean, if you’re wrong, wouldn’t you want to know that? Wouldn’t you want to correct yourself and abide in truth?

My conclusion is that some people willfully choose to live in ignorance, even when the truth is readily apparent to anyone with just a shred of critical thinking skills.

When our hearts are hungry, it’s because we’ve sought nourishment that is either wrong or inadequate. If someone is starving, and they only drink some water, they aren’t going to have their needs met. Water is necessary for life, of course, but by itself it isn’t sufficient.

To torture this analogy a bit more … you have to stay hydrated to live. So drink your 64 oz. a day, or whatever the current recommendation is.

And at the same time, don’t eat any solid food. Your rationale is, “I don’t want to eat solid food. I don’t believe it has any value. It’s a hard pass for me.”

Eventually you’ll die from that belief. You believed it was true. But your subjective truth doesn’t stand up to reality. And if you starved, I just bet you wouldn’t get much sympathy. Some folks with a mean streak might say, “Well, you had it coming.”

The solution would be just to put on your big boy/girl pants, admit you were wrong about solid food, and order pizza.

I could go really deep in the weeds with this, but let me try to wrap it up.

You have been bombarded with conflicting worldviews recently. You can’t escape it, unless you’re isolated from the rest of the world and have no outside input of any sort. That’s not true, of course; you’re reading this.

It’s possible that what you’ve wanted to believe hasn’t held up to scrutiny. You’ve justified, rationalized, and have still found yourself frustrated and defensive. Because what you’ve wanted to be true simply isn’t.

In other words, you’ve been eating untruths because your heart was hungry, and it’s still not satisfied. You’ve settled for water – which is a good, essential thing – but that’s as far as your taking care of yourself has gone. You just haven’t mustered up the courage to say to yourself and to others those horrible three words:

I was wrong.

Want to get right? Here’s the simple solution – but note I said simple, not easy.

Fill your heart with Jesus. Believer, take heed.

You can not, must not believe your untruths. Jesus is truth. There’s no gray. I’d admit that, with our frail and feeble human eyes, it’s dang hard to put aside the worldly stuff, simply because it’s tangible and palpable and you can watch it on TV. That’s a temporal reality, and not the ultimate truth. So we have to see things through His eyes and not through our faulty, biased, and corrupted eyes.

I went into this in some detail in my last blog about January 6. I won’t rehash it here.

My admonition to all of us is to simply be able to admit that if we have been wrong, we’ve been wrong. There’s no shame there. You are no less a person. You have lost no value. It just means that you have had trouble letting go of what you want to believe, and now it’s time to embrace the Who you need to believe.

It’s called having the mind of Christ.

There is hope for both you and me. Our hope is built on truth, and to the extent that we reject truth, we are just that much closer to being hopeless.

I’ve been struck on social media by what is coming from believers. They are talking like lost pagan sinners, and God seems to have no place in their thinking. I’m not so high and mighty as to say I’ve never been there, but I am striving to be honest with all, beginning with myself.

If it’s true, then, that we eat untruths when our hearts are hungry, then we need to nourish our hearts with the Bread of Life. That’s good groceries right there.

And second, because we’ve taken that step, we will be able to identify, call out, and banish untruths. We will be at peace regardless of dumpster fires. In Christ, not only will we be fine … we will prevail.

Be blessed.