A few years ago, I was given a random task that I did not ask for: I was appointed the Dean of Students at my school in Mississippi.  That's right.  It was my job to go around and bust students who had caused trouble, and this consisted of doing things like finding out who threw trash all over the courtyard, who put gum on the computer screen in the computer lab, and who left school for McDonald's and then came back to class.  I was essentially a private investigator, and every day involved phone calls with students, parents, teachers, or employees at McDonald's to find the Truth.  Of course, this responsibility immediately diminished my “street cred” with the student body, and eventually some students nicknamed me “Mr. Sneaky Sneaky”, but it was a great learning experience.    

After 3 months of working on the job, I began to notice a curious phenomenon: I could almost always “solve” the crime.  For about 90% of the cases, I was confident that I had discovered the Truth.

What I came to realize is that the Truth always leaves a trail.  When I was hunting for the Truth in a given situation, there were always repercussions, consequences, and after-effects that lead back to what actually happened.  Truth, in a very real sense, is concrete.  It leaves an impact, an impression, on the very fabric of reality, on the very fabric of space-time.  It distorts and alters things around it, just as a living tree distorts the ground as its roots disperse through the soil.   When students made up lies about what had happened, it only took a little bit of investigation to discover that these were in fact lies and not the Truth because the after-effects couldn't be found.  If a student truly went to McDonald's, but he told me he was just studying in the library, then I simply had to check the library logs of students who signed in.  His act of going to the library would have left a trace, an imprint, but if no imprints could be found, then his story starts to get awfully suspicious.  If there are no roots altering the soil, then there is no tree that is above the ground.  So, I go to his car, have him open the front door, and I find a McDonald's bag.  I tell him to take it out and open it up.  Inside, there is a receipt with the time and date corresponding to his third period class.  Case closed.  The Truth has been discovered, and the lies have been rooted out.

Truth ALWAYS leaves a trail.  It ALWAYS leaves an impact.  It is real, and real things influence other real things.  Anything that exists in this world, by the very fact that it exists, distorts other things around it.  As a Dean of Students, I simply needed to find these disturbances, these impressions, in order to find the Truth.  Follow the ripples in the wave back to the origin, and you will find the stone that was thrown in the water.  Follow the trail of the consequences, and you will always be lead back to the Truth.  You can tell me all you want about how abortion funding is not in the Health Care Reform Bill and that my tax dollars will not go to paying for abortions, and you can even have the President of the United States claim on national television that abortion will not be publicly funded, but I simply need to follow the ripples to see if this is true.  Even the President of the United States cannot stop the altercation of the fabric of space-time, the very fabric of reality.  A review of the House Bill (prior to the Stupak Amendment) shows that this claim is (was) false, and now I have to hear people in the Senate make the same absurd claims against reality.  How boring. 

This fundamental property of Truth helps to distinguish Truth from lies because lies, in the end, are not real.  They don't exist.  They are only an idea, a possibility that never existed, and if it never existed, it will not leave an imprint.  If there are no ripples on the surface, then there was no stone thrown into the water. 

Finding the Truth is infinitely more easy than finding a lie because Truth is real and a lie is not.  Finding the Truth among so many lies is like finding the one living human being in a  wax museum.  If it is breathing, you found the human.  There, that was easy.  It may take you a while to actually find the breathing human, but the time it takes to find the human is not the point.  It is the incredible ease with which one can distinguish between “Truth” and “lies” that is critically important.  I can understand if you haven't “found the human” in the wax museum (sorting through 10,000 pages of the Health Care Reform Bill is no easy task), but I can't understand those who are staring at the human and the wax figure side by side and pondering which one is real. 

We live in an age where rampant questioning abounds.  Our society questions everything, so much so that it is much more “chic” to express uncertainty than it is to express belief.  It is better for your social image if you claim to have no alliances than it is to stand your ground.  A silent acceptance is more valued than vocal resolve.  In all of this questioning, I think many people have lost both the ability and the desire to find the Truth.  I can't explain to someone how to desire to find the Truth, but if you want the ability to find the Truth, you need only follow the ripples on the water.

Truth is real.  Lies are imagined. 

And real things always leave a trail.

Happy hunting.