A Little White Lie

Let’s break it down, just for the linguistic fun of it:

A – one of the shortest words in the English language; even beats out “I” because it is supposedly a shorter syllable.

Little – used to emphasize how small an amount is

White – usually associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity; the color of perfection; a positive connotation

Lie – speak falsely or utter untruth knowingly; as with intent to deceive

Put them all together:

A little white lie – a lie about a seemingly small or unimportant/insignificant matter that someone tells to avoid hurting another person

Put that on the back burner of your mental stove and let it simmer.

Do you recall ever hearing the simple riddle of how to eat an elephant?  The answer being ‘one bite at a time.’  Put that on the other back burner.

One more thing to add into the mix…”marijuana is the gateway drug to ‘harder’ drug…”  Hmm…..I guess who ever dreamed this phrase up couldn’t see the shot of whiskey or beer bottle on their desk.

Back to the white lie…

From a ‘mathematical approach,’ I should be able to add up the definitions of the individual words and get the same overall meaning of the phrase.  Surprisingly, it almost works except for ‘white.’  A huge contradiction between what ‘white’ represents versus a ‘lie.’  So we in effect twist the context of ‘white’ and use its meaning to soften the blow of lying to someone…I don’t want to hurt your feelings….I don’t want to offend you…etc.

So to put all of my mental babbling together….

A little white lie is the first bite out of the elephant of truth and it’s the gateway to something that can rapidly become something hurtful.  Usually the act of white-lying is just another layer of hiding a bigger, deeper, darker lie.

So….what brought all of this on?  Why the fascination about white lies?

The other night my wife and I were on the couch; it was potty time for me and upon assuming the position on the great throne of thought…I had a thought.  More like the question, “where’s my cell phone?”  Then I remembered that I left it on the couch next to my wife; mystery solved and I’d just have to get on with business instead of sitting there pondering the universe through my phone.

The kicker in this, is that a scant 3 years ago I would have been in a semi-state of panic.  “Oh expletive!”  What did I leave open?  What email is not deleted?  What game chat is not closed?  I wouldn’t have had thoughts like that back then if I had been honest…not just honest with my wife, but with myself.  The liar’s best friend is guilt, and then they invite the rest of their buddies: anxiety, stress, etc. Yet that night when I lost my phone, it was an epiphany.  The realization of how completely free I felt that I no longer have to worry about what I said/lied about, felt guilty about.

When you accept Christ, you sometimes hear about having your chains broken.  I had never really considered “lying” as a chain; certainly not a major one.  Yet the joy I felt in the realization of the freedom I now have from not lying…was just…just amazing, and now it’s something else not to take for granted.  Moreover, something else to thank Jesus/God/Lord for doing for me.  Yes, I’m still confused by some of this Christianity stuff but after all – I’m still a baby christian, and I will be for a long time.

Case in point:

God takes lying pretty seriously; it’s the ninth commandment.  Yet you can find examples of acceptable lying in the Bible.  Something in the book of Joshua about two Israelite spies in Jericho and how the prostitute Rahab conveniently neglects to mention to the authorities that she knows where they were from.  So the Bible has examples of where lying is OK; go figure.

But I will say what I do know.  That happened a few thousand years ago and whatever transpired is between God and them.  It’s certainly not my place to judge.  I also know that the gift was given to me, that freed me from lying, from porn, from all of the stupid stuff that took so much from me, from my wife, and what hurt so many people in my past…I know that it is real and that’s what makes sense to me.

My wife’s uncle was a pastor for years and he once said that no one has it right; which is pretty evident when you see the thousands of different religions in the world.  Kind of like the old Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” and the lyric “…nobody is right if everybody is wrong…”  My wife and I watch Perry Noble when we can; in one sermon (many moons ago) he mentioned he was sick of religion, and all he was going to do was to follow Jesus.  I think that’s pretty good advice.

How can you go wrong?