We often feel limited in our approach.
Constrained by a sense that above all we must maintain consistency. Fearful that someone might discover we have shifted our perspective, or worse yet, that we were wrong. We feel that once we have said or done something, we must remain true to that for the remainder of time, lest someone call us hypocritical.
Furthermore, we believe we must react and respond uniformly to all situations and people. And that the only appropriate reaction is peaceful and collected. We rarely leave ourselves room for even the slightest deviation.
However, this ‘truth’ is self-created and errant. Jesus, the ultimate ‘for example’, was not always meek and mild. And God has never been shy to express his displeasure. Instead they have responded with integrity to the truth.
“Make sure you stay alert to these qualities of gentle kindness and ruthless severity that exist side by side in God-ruthless with the deadwood, gentle with the grafted shoot. But don’t presume on this gentleness. The moment you become deadwood you’re out of there.”
Paul explains that God keenly discerns us and responds accordingly. When we are tapped in, he is gentle and nourishes us. Conversely, if we reject him and cut him off, he will not hesitate to respond accordingly. For he is guided not by consistency, but integrity. He is not afraid to reverse his position given a change in circumstances and instead consistently lives in truth.
I think Emerson sums it up well in an excerpt from Self Reliance:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Our understanding and perspective will shift over time as we gain information and maturity. We must embody this shift and live accordingly, not shut out revelation in order to appear to remain consistent and thus give credence to the sunk cost fallacy. For to fear how people might perceive our shifts is a fool’s errand. And we will make a plethora of misjudgments in our lifetime.
Let us then release ourselves from the prisons of thought we have created in our minds and instead embrace and extol the truth. We may well be misunderstood, but living a falsehood for the sake of appearances is far worse fate. To live simply is to live in truth.