For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.
(1 Corinthians 14:33)
By Dr. Michael Linton
One of the discussion topics of the 2012 Transformations and Renewals Conference held over the weekend of October 13/14 in West Point, Tennessee, was “People.” We talked about a lot of things: how important it is to find a community of people who share our own particular values and goals, how often finding that kind of community is difficult, how the internet both helps to develop communities (after all, we were at this conference because of the internet) yet how the internet at the same time both fights against communities and creates false ones (as in the example of Facebook “friends”). We talked about how do deal with fear (of terrorists, of climate change, carbon footprints, epidemics, politician “A” or politician “B,” “kill shots” from the sun, the list keeps going), and how important it is to find people who we can trust and what we can do when our trust is betrayed. It was a very interesting four hours spent thinking over these issues together. But at the end we were a bit surprised when we discovered that fundamental to all of our talk was the matter of CLARITY.
Before we can have a community, before we can enjoy fully trusting relationships, before we are able to deal with those lists of boogiemen OO even before we know how to deal with betrayal OO we need clarity (which we took as synonymous with truth and honesty). We need true information about and a clear understanding of what actually is going on in our businesses, in our towns and counties and in national politics. We need to clearly understand what both drives the kind of things we’re taught and the ways in which we’re taught them, we need to clearly understand what’s in the food we’re eating and what’s in the air we’re breathing. We need clarity about the actual buying power of our currency and the purity of our drinking water. And when we have clarity about these matters, on that foundation, on the foundation of clarity, we can start to build the relationships that are essential to our financial, physical, emotional, and spiritual well being.
