Beauty close by

Driving to my parents house from the west, you have to drive by this piece of property, probably 100 acres of undeveloped "ranch land." I put the quotes because I've never really seen more than 10 or 15 cows, and most of the property is in a flood plain. I don't know how useable it is for grazing or raising cows or sheep or other livestock, but that 100 acre plot is one of my favorite places in the world.

When my parents built their house in their suburban neighborhood 7 years ago, it was on the growing edge of northeast San Antonio. It was well within the city, accessible to major freeways and all of that, but still separate enough to feel like you weren't in the middle of town. Since then, the area has exploded with shopping centers and gas stations and more track housing than ought to be legal. Except for those 100 acres.

One corner of the property in particular will probably always be one of those memory sweet spots that lives forever in my mind. It's on a gentle rise, so it fills the horizon as you drive past it. Every spring the landscape progresses from blues to yellows to whites with little spots and speckles of reds and orange when the wildflowers bloom in succession. It seems like a piece of Montana, transplanted close by so that I can either stoke my longing for the wilderness or at least continue to believe that I'm a mountain man in my heart.

I'm grateful for the little reminders that even as things drive forward and grow skyward, there is still hope for open spaces and natural beauty. Someday the owner of that property will pass on, and that wonderful piece of property will pass into the hands of someone else. I hope they love it as much as I do. Or I hope that I have enough money to buy 100 acres of woods in the middle of suburban San Antonio.

Speaking the Truth in Love: rightness to the core

When Paul tells his Ephesian listeners that it's time to move from spiritual infancy to spiritual adulthood, he challenges them to the highest level of "rightness."

"Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ." Ephesians 4:15

By speaking the truth in love, we grow up. By not speaking the truth in love, we don't grow up. It's easy for me to see the truth. I'm just wired that way. I can smell the crap a mile away and cut through it quickly. I struggle with the love part. Not the friendship or the respect, but the kind of love that softens the sharpness of tone that the truth can sometimes wield. The truth hurts because usually the time someone needs to hear truth the most is when they're living blindly oblivious to it.

After our small group tonight I had to have a hard conversation with a couple that I've known for almost 2 years. The guy called the church one day and got me on the phone and we talked for over an hour about the hard times he was facing. He and his fiancee at the time came to our group a few weeks later and they've been faithful ever since. They're married now and have a hard marriage. They both bring baggage from previous marriages and hard life issues, and they have a hard time unpacking it.

Before I went to group, I prayed that God would guide my words tonight. We were talking about the role of men and women in marriage, and the couple's baggage was there in the room again, and I felt like I should address it with them. It was a hard conversation before it ever began. How do you gently reveal blindspots? How do you help someone see something that's glaring to everyone else, but blissfully dark to them?

So we went outside and had the conversation in private. I talked with Natalie afterward and I think that what I said to them was truth.

I'm not sure that what I said to them was said with love.

I believe in hard conversations. I think the Church is weakened when we shy away from helping others see the things that are killing them. But tonight I realized, again, why the love part is so important. Without love, words are clanging cymbals; obnoxious noise and meaningless syllables strung together. My friends may have heard truthful words tonight, but I don't know that those words will ever find their place. Love makes the hard truth land gently, so it grows.

Truth is easy to spot, and pointing it out is a cheap gift. Speaking the truth in love is the measure of maturity because it means that the truth spoken is for the benefit of the other party, not simply for the benefit of being right. On some level, my heart was and is to see my friends have a better marriage than they can imagine. But I fear that the truth destroyed tonight, rather than building up.

Personally, this is a lesson hard learned. I've made this mistake before, even recently to much the same result as this time. Culturally, I think this is a balance that I want the Church to wrestle with more publicly and honestly. Like I said before, I think the Church needs to have the hard conversations with the culture, and I think we need to have the hard conversations with ourselves. But the greatest command is not to tell truth. The greatest command is to love. The lines are blurry, because love expects the best and has an obligation to the loved one to help them realize the best. But I've seen the truth spoken in love, and I've seen the miraculous results it brings.

I hope I have the opportunity to make it up to my friends. I hope I have the opportunity to speak love into their lives. I hope that as they see that love, they hear the truth as well.