Learning to See Truth Differently

Most of my days are spent reading closely.

Contracts, policies, correspondence. Language that has to hold up under pressure. Every word matters, not just for what it says, but for what it allows. What can be argued. What can be defended. What can be left open.

You learn quickly that clarity isn’t always the goal.

Precision is.

Precision is about control.

It’s about narrowing meaning, defining terms, removing ambiguity where you can. It gives structure to something that might otherwise be too loose to rely on. In the right context, it works. It holds.

You start to trust it.

But over time, you also start to notice its limits.

Not everything can be resolved through language. Not everything can be clarified, negotiated, or reduced to something stable. There are situations where the more you try to define something, the further you move from what it actually is.

It doesn’t always hold.

That difference becomes more obvious outside of work.

In conversations that don’t follow structure. In relationships that aren’t governed by clear terms. In questions that don’t have a single defensible answer.

And especially in Scripture.

Reading the Bible requires a different kind of attention.

Not less careful, but less controlled. You can’t approach it as something to resolve or master. It doesn’t yield to that kind of reading. The meaning doesn’t narrow in the way legal language does. It opens.

Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.

But not on demand.

There are passages that don’t make sense the first time you read them. Or the second. Or the tenth. And yet, over time, they begin to settle differently. Not because you’ve figured them out, but because you’ve stayed with them long enough for something to take shape.

It’s not precision.

It’s something closer to recognition.

Working in law trained me to look for what can be supported, what can be proven, what can hold up under scrutiny.

Faith has been different.

It hasn’t replaced that way of thinking, but it hasn’t followed it either. It asks for something else. Not less attention, but a different kind. One that isn’t always trying to resolve what it sees.

That’s been the shift.

Learning that truth isn’t always something you arrive at through tighter language or better arguments. Sometimes it’s something you come to recognize over time, through repetition, through staying close, through returning to the same place again and again.

I still read closely.

But I don’t expect everything to resolve the same way.