It looks like laughter

Today I need truth.
Contrary to popular belief, there is a such thing as truth, yet  it is not what I once dogmatically defined it to be.

Truth is not a system, a code, a list or a statement.

Truth is a person or rather, a being, the incarnate word, love Himself- Jesus.

How do you live when truth is a being? What does that look like?

It’s hard to capture. I once thought it was doing everything by the book. Just do _____ and you will get/be_____________.
But, I am thankful the reality is a lot more like poetry and less like a step-by-step manual.

It’s more like holding a newborn baby and watching an orange moon rise and less like attempting to be the standard of excellence and honor.

It looks like love.
It looks like love that shatters, consumes, overcomes.
It looks like believing.
It looks like believing in something secedes a signed paper commitment, a legal binding, a cause and effect threat.

It looks like relationship that has far deeper substance then what someone can bring into my life, how they make me feel, the things we can accomplish.

It looks like believing in love when I can’t believe in anything else.

It looks like new life: abundant life; messy, bloody, squirming, crying, beautiful life.

How does truth set you free, and what does it look like?

Truth sets you free looks a lot less like announcing that your thoughts line up with a particular statement, and more like a stepping into the light of love where nothing where nothing is hidden.
It looks like not simply the initial removal of chains, but the constant remembrance that while you may rub your wrists and feel that handcuffs are still on, they have been forever removed.

I was reading the other day about Isaac being born to Abraham and Sarah. Isaac was the promise they waited for for nearly a century; promise they tried to bring about in their own way, a promise they had to be willing to give up before they saw it come to be. In Galatians, the Apostle Paul talks about Isaac being a picture the new covenant, the new order, the old passing away because it brought nothing but slavery and death.

Isaac means laughter.

When God truly set me from the bondage of the old covenant I was still unknowingly living under, I was in hotel room on Gulou street in Tianjin, China.
I could see the chains fall off me as begin to see, begin to believe, began to be set free.

How I’d weep; at times out of anger of feeling so fooled about what I believed the gospel to be my entire life, at times of the irony of the simplicity of it all, but mostly out of joy.
I’d also laugh in my sleep, dreaming of a kingdom of light, a real realm where everyone is forgiven and loved.

It looks like laughter.