People of the Lie

As I travelled through a bustling city, I couldn’t help but feel a little down seeing all the posters and adverts promising never-ending youth and glamour. Huge billboards showed off products and services that claimed to keep you looking and feeling young. Among them were ads for big hospitals offering total health and everlasting youth! But is any of this actually true? Or is it just a story made up for business, something many of us end up chasing? It’s as if we’re told that growing old doesn’t have to happen, at least for a while, and we all get swept up in make-believe. We ignore the reality of mortality for this dream of staying young. 

 

Oddly enough, I was on my way to a classmate’s funeral - a friend my own age who passed away suddenly. At the same time, I was also keeping in touch with someone younger than me, who had suffered an unexpected heart event in a faraway place, helping them decide what to do next.

It made me stop and think—what’s really true for me right now?

 

When I chat with older people these days, I often hear them say the world seems to be made for the young and those who are always busy. There’s this idea floating around that being productive is what makes us valuable, and many of us buy into it. Viktor Frankl, in his book "Man’s Search for Meaning", says: “It may be true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past – the potentialities they have actualised, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realised – and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.”

 

The news is also full of lies from leaders. Every day we hear stories about wars and conflicts, with each country or leader pushing their own version of the truth, hoping their people will believe it – and often, we do. Even religious leaders can use untruths to get what they want. Most of us just accept what we’re told without questioning it. 

In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck puts it like this:

“How could a whole people have gone to war not knowing why? The answer is simple. As a people we were too lazy to learn and too arrogant to think we needed to learn. We felt that whatever way we happened to perceive things was the right way without any further study. And that whatever we did was the right thing to do without reflection. We were so wrong because we never seriously considered that we might not be right.” 

 

Then there are the lies we tell ourselves. Sometimes we convince ourselves we’re fine and everyone else is the problem - a way of justifying ourselves. Or we think we’re not good enough, or that the world is out to get us. Some of these feelings come from things that have happened to us before, and we start to believe that our past will always shape our future. Trauma from the past defining us. 

 

All these messages tell us that being vulnerable, feeling broken, or having weaknesses are part of life, but  we should never show it. We end up living a lie, tucking away all those negative thoughts. But in truth, it’s those very vulnerabilities and weaknesses - being honest about them - that give us real strength to live our lives.

 

So, how did we end up living like this, as people of the lie? Maybe it’s because truth became something to be argued over and thrown away, instead of something we live out. We end up like Pilate, who, when faced with someone who was truth in person, could only ask, “What is truth?” When confronted with this statement, “Everyone who cares for truth, who has any feeling for the truth, recognises my voice,” Pilate ended up with this rhetorical question. 

The answer isn’t to keep living a lie or to believe what society tells us, but to live out the truth, even if it means we are broken and challenged, and let our lives speak for what’s real. And not be deluded by the cultural lies. And recognise that life is worth living today fully, because He lives! (In us too)