Truth Telling

Excerpt from Elizabeth Elliot Daily Devotional

Recently I met a friend for lunch whom I had not seen for twenty years. As I approached the restaurant I was thinking the usual thoughts: Will she have changed much? Will I recognize her? Will we be able to find things to talk about?

I saw her as soon as I got there, and I knew that if I said, "Why, Helen, you haven't changed a bit! " it would be a bald lie. The truth was that Helen was beautiful now. She had never been a beauty in college. The years and her experiences (some of them of a kind of suffering I knew nothing about) had given her a deep womanliness, a kind of tender strength. Her eyes glowed, there was passion about her mouth, and the lines of her face revealed a strength of character she could not have had when she was a college student. So, instead of the usual pleasantries, I simply started with the truth. I told her what I saw in her face. Of course she was taken aback, but I am sure that this unorthodox beginning did not render further conversation more difficult. We were able to get down to the real things in life, things that matter and that had changed us both, rather than spending an hour on the ages of our children, their mates and careers, and our latest diets and recipes.

We all know that the truth often hurts. We use this cliche as a defense for having hurt someone, and sometimes it is indeed necessary to tell this kind of truth. But there is truth which does not hurt--truth which encourages and surprises with delight and gratitude. What if a teacher sees that a colleague of hers has succeeded in breaking down the resistance of a pupil who has been the despair of the other teachers, the talk of the faculty lunchroom? The change in the student is noticed, a sigh of relief is heaved, but who goes to the teacher herself and says, "Thanks! You've done what the rest of us couldn't do!" How many are free enough from themselves to recognize the worth of others and to speak of it honestly?

A lady who is a good many years older than I tells me often of the aunt who was a mother to her throughout her childhood. "Auntie'' impressed her with the need to tell the truth--the welcome kind--and she would add emphatically, "Tell them now." My friend calls me on the telephone--sometimes to thank me for a note or a little gift, sometimes to tell me what my friendship means to her.

"You remember what Auntie always said," she will say, ''so, I'm telling you now." There would be no way for me to exaggerate how she has cheered and helped me.

I was talking with a lady who had been a missionary for forty years, and I noticed that she had exceptionally lovely hands. "Has anyone ever told you your hands are beautiful?'' I asked. The dear soul was so flustered one might have thought I had committed an indecency. She looked at her hands in amazement.

"Why . . . why no. I don't think anyone ever has!'' But she saw that I meant it, and she had the grace to hear the truth. She said thank you.

"Tell it like it is," is the watchword today. But suppose it's lovely? Suppose it's actually beautiful? C. S. Lewis said that the most fatal of all nonconductors is embarrassment. It seems to me that life is all too short to let embarrassment deprive us and our friends of the pleasure of telling the happy truth. Suppose the boy who does your lawn does it fast, trims it perfectly, and takes care of the tools? Suppose the clerk who waits on you happens to be the most gracious one you've ever encountered? Suppose even that your husband--when you stop for once to look at him, to think about him as a person and as a man--seems to you to be the best man you know?

Tell them.

Tell them now.

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Key thought: "It seems to me that life is all too short to let embarrassment deprive us and our friends of the pleasure of telling the happy truth."