The Courage to Face Facts

In the process of adjusting to life, we all have some problems. And growing up is part of the process and the problem⎯sometimes a rather painful part. As Paul comments: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Discipline, whether imposed by others or self-imposed, isn’t easy to take; nor are facts always easy to face. Pride and habit, and comfort and convenience, and prejudice and pleasure often come in conflict with facts, with truth and reality, with law and order. And in moving toward maturity, sooner or later we learn that there are some things that will adjust to us, and some things we have to adjust to. Some people will adjust to us⎯especially if they love us. (Blessedly, there are those who will give a little more than they demand.) Some situations will adjust to us. We can alter our environment⎯somewhat; and there are more and more things that we can modify for our comfort and convenience.

But there are some things that no man can modify, regardless of his comfort or convenience, or his pride or prejudices, or his appetites or pleasures. To quote a much-quoted sentence: “We have to learn to change what we can change, and to accept what we cannot change⎯and to learn the difference between the two.”

We have to adjust to truth. Truth doesn’t adjust itself to us. We have to adjust to law. We have to learn to keep commandments. They are not always convenient, but they are always there, and they don’t bend with our bending, or yield with our yielding.

Yet too many of us go through too much of life resenting and resisting the irrevocable realities⎯the facts, the laws, the commandments that we don’t find it convenient to keep. We acquire habits and prejudices, and hold them to our hearts. We accept theories, and resist the inroads of further facts and findings. Sometimes it is almost as if a rock were to say to gravity: “I will ignore your pull upon me.” The rock may resist⎯but sooner or late gravity will get it. There are causes and consequences in all things, and no one ever ignores them without sometime finding that they are in full force.

“There is a law, irrevocably decreed …upon which all blessings are predicated.” And the sooner we learn to live within the law, the sooner we learn to respect facts, the sooner we learn to keep commandments, the sooner we learn to adjust to truth (and learn that it will not adjust to us, that it will not yield to our yielding, and bend to our bending), the more happiness we shall have, and the more peace we shall find inside ourselves.