when society cannot tell the truth

Editor’s note: This reflection, offered as lament, seeks to name complexity without excusing harm and hold truth with clarity and care.

We live in a time where truth feels increasingly unstable — distorted, flattened, and weaponized. Context is lost, nuance dismissed, and certainty is rewarded even when it rests on nothing solid.

I am watching this happen in real time.

Collectively — and especially in America right now — we appear to have lost whatever shared sense of decency or decorum once existed, whether that sense was real or imagined. The veil has lifted. The veneer is gone. The cracks have now widened into chasms that can no longer be papered over.

And what remains is exposure.

I am seeing people who are mentally, emotionally, and physically unwell — not saying this as moral judgment, but as reality.

I am seeing fear dressed up as conviction, insecurity masquerading as control, and volume being substituted for wisdom.

I am seeing how easily we become divided, territorial, and certain, even when we are deeply misinformed.

I am also seeing how often we are naive — all of us, at different times, about different things. How quickly we believe what confirms us. How rarely we pause long enough to ask what we might be missing.

This is not condemnation.
It is grief.

Recently, I experienced what it feels like to have a lie told about me — and to watch that lie move freely, reported and repeated as if truth were optional. I found myself wondering not only when accountability will come, but whether or not it still holds the weight it once did in our society.

That experience was personal.
But it did not feel unique.

It felt like one small instance of a much larger sickness — a society struggling to tell the truth, sit with complexity, and hold moral responsibility without immediately deflecting it.

I am watching how power protects itself. How privilege cushions some while others absorb the full impact of harm. How access — to money, to family safety nets, to social credibility — quietly shapes whose mistakes are overlooked or forgiven and whose lives are upended.

None of us stand outside this reality. Whether we want to see it and believe it or not.

We are all shaped by what we inherit — by the meals we assume will be there, the water we expect to run, and the names that open doors or close them. Some of us are protected in ways we rarely have to name. Others learn very early how exposed life can be.

I am grieving how rarely we acknowledge this uneven ground.

I am grieving how quickly we turn everything into sides — political, religious, cultural — as if belonging requires opposition. How we argue endlessly about representation and identity while ignoring the deeper truth that contradiction has always lived within us.

It’s not either/or.
It’s often both — when we are speaking about complexity, not when we are excusing harm.

Nuance helps us understand how people arrive where they are; however, it does not absolve us from naming what is true.

Lies remain lies. Harm remains harm. Accountability cannot be softened into abstraction without cost.

I am tired of the noise.
I am tired of the cruelty disguised as honesty.
I am tired of outrage without repair and speech without listening.

And yet — here I am still trying to be salt and light.

Lately, my prayer has been simple and heavy:
God, the ocean is so big, and my boat is so small. What else am I to do?

I do not have a tidy solution.
I do not have a manifesto.

What I do have is a growing conviction that something within us must slow down — that we must learn how to listen, doubt our hastily drawn conclusions and oversimplified certainties, and sit with the discomfort of not having the whole story.

Silence can be faithful restraint.
Silence can also be complicity.

I am learning how often silence is the more faithful response — yet I am clear-eyed about how often silence becomes protection of harm rather than an expression of humility.

Humility is not weakness.
Neither is listening. If you are a true follower of the ways of Christ, you know that Jesus modeled both humility and deep listening.

Accountability without humanity is hollow — as is humanity without accountability.

So today, I lament for:

A society that knows something is wrong but cannot yet agree to tell the truth about it.
All the ways we harm each other while yet insisting we are righteous.
The distance growing between who we claim to be and how we actually live.

And yet I am still choosing peace.
Still choosing care.
Still choosing to begin where I can — with my own listening, repenting, and refusing to harden.

Because peace on earth begins with me.