seeing through the veil of humanity

do you ever wonder how much what you believe is truth is affected by subjective things?

moving overseas as a teenager made me see how much our culture affects our perception. those things that we would call right or wrong, the process we might use to get there, and the whole framework from which we see the world is affected by the worldview that is born in our culture.

in recent years i've also seen how much personality affects perspective. two people can have the same thing happen and yet experience it differently. one person, whose personality thrives in rationality, will see and experience truth in a very cognitive way. a different person, driven by emotion, will sense truth, will sense what is real.

these things also affect our relationships, i think, and is one reason why every relationship looks different. every marriage is made up of two individuals, distinct as individuals, and together, distinct from other couples. what works in their relationship may not work in others, because they are unique. the way each experiences their relationship may be different from the other, and the way they experience it as a couple is different from other couple's relationships. cultural values also affect our expectations of what relationships will be like: what we will gain from them, what we will give to them, and what they should consist of.

all this makes me wonder how much our personalities and our worldviews affect the way we see and experience God. many of us walk thru life believing that we really know and understand who God is, and what he wants - almost as if he is containable inside the human imagination. sometimes i think that we forget that our understanding of truth - of God - is limited by our human perspective, a perspective that is informed by our personality, culture, and life experience.

we are so quick to call our beliefs truth. it's so tempting to do so. to know truth is to be secure - or at least to think that you're secure.

besides the fact that he is a being who exists apart from our beliefs, could our diversity of personality and life experience account for some of the differences we face? could this be a reason that God seems near to some, yet far from others?

i think that it must.

i do believe that God is truth. i believe that truth - that God - is absolute. i simply understand that whatever i know of God & experience of him is affected by my humanity.