If Truth Sets You Free, Ignoring It Does The Opposite

Everybody loves the first half of the verse.

The truth will set you free.

We put it on coffee mugs and church walls. We say it at graduations. We love it because freedom sounds like a gift with no bill attached.

But read it like it is the first time. If truth is the thing that sets you free, then it follows, plainly, that ignoring truth is the thing that keeps you bound.

There is no neutral. You do not get to hear the truth and set it on a shelf and stay exactly where you were.

You either move toward it and get freer.

Or you avoid it and get more bound.

Avoidance Is Not Safety

Here is the lie underneath most stuck lives.

We treat avoiding the truth like it is the safe option. Like if I just do not look at it, do not name it, do not deal with it, I get to stay comfortable.

That is not how it works. Avoidance is not a pause button. It is a direction.

Hosea named the mechanism almost three thousand years ago. My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. He was not talking about IQ. He was talking about the refusal to know what they already half-knew.

The truth you keep avoiding does not go quiet. It goes to work. Underground. In your body. In your sleep. In the low-grade dread you carry into every room and cannot explain.

You already know the thing. The conversation you keep not having. The number you keep not looking at. The relationship you keep excusing. The tool you keep refusing to understand because understanding it would require you to change.

The bondage is not the truth. The bondage is the avoiding.

The Prudent See It And Move

Solomon said the prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.

Notice he did not say the prudent avoid danger. He said they see it. They look straight at the thing. Then they act.

Prudence is not fear. Prudence is paying attention on purpose.

The simple keep going. Not because they are rebellious. Because looking felt harder than walking past it. And they pay the penalty every single time, usually with interest, usually years later.

The freest people I know are not the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones who refuse to lie to themselves about the problems they have.

Fear Is Why You Are Not Looking

Here is the part I need you to hear.

You are not avoiding the truth because you are lazy or faithless. You are avoiding it because of fear. Almost always one of two.

Fear of the unknown, which freezes you and tells you not to look because you might not be able to handle what you see.

Or fear of missing out, which flings you so fast into the next thing that you never sit still long enough for the truth to catch you.

You cannot deal with truth you are too afraid to face. And you cannot face a fear you have never named.

So name it. That is the whole first step.

The Fear Compass shows you, in three minutes, which fear has been keeping you from looking at the thing you already know you need to look at. It is free. It is honest. And it is the door out of the avoidance.

→ Take the free Fear Compass HERE
 
Truth sets you free.

Avoiding it just quietly locks the door from the inside.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. Next week I want to talk about why we avoid the truth even when part of us wants it. There is one thing underneath it that most people will never admit, and it hates being corrected because correction threatens the one thing it is really protecting. Control. Don't forget to look for the ravens.