Mountain Musings Truth Essay #2 “The Search for Truth”

 


Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. II Timothy 2:15 English Standard Version

               I sighed as I scanned my email inbox. I recognized the name on one of the messages and knew without reading what the author, a helicopter parent, had said. I was teaching a dual-credit English Literature class and had just posted the grades for a major paper. Their student, a young lady with serious struggles, had begged to be allowed into the class. I had said no, which ignited an extended back and forth, ultimately landing on the desk of the principal. Eventually with misgivings, I relented. I should have insisted. The student struggled from the first day. They seriously underestimated the amount of work the course required. There was an extensive reading requirement, many short essays, and several long papers to compose. What she and many other students underestimated was the amount of time they would need to spend in research to support their essays and papers. Commitment to scholarship implies a commitment to finding the truth and properly reporting it. While a pleasant young lady, this student was not committed to finding and properly handling the truth.

               Crushed by multiple requirements, she’d found an essay online that supported her contention and copied it into her own essay. The copied portion comprised around four pages of a five-page assignment. She assumed that I would not notice the radical change of voice and quality. She earned a zero for plagiarism. While the college allowed me to drop her from the course for that infraction, I allowed her to stay in the course in order to graduate. She managed to not fail, but ended the semester with a D. She graduated from high school; however, when she attended college, she had to repeat the course, all because she could not rightly handle truth.

               Engaging in public discourse as Christians requires a firm conviction to search out and share truth. Too many Christians engage in public debates without first apprehending the truth of an issue. Most of the time we simply do not engage in the search, simply accepting what some talking head that we like says as truth. Wedded to the party which best suits our own proclivities, we ignobly parrot the party-line without ascertaining the facts. Unfortunately, the laziness of the Thessalonian Christians better describes us instead of the diligence of the Bereans of Acts.

10 The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. 11 Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Acts 17:10-11

               As committed believers, we must willingly gird up our intellectual loins and search for the truth, ignoring the easy platitude and meme driven social media landscape of modern American culture and politics. As believers, we represent the Lord in our public commentary. We should be those who diligently search out the truth prior to posting and eschew simply repeating what someone else says.

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