Half a Truth Is a Whole Job

The jam happens in September and it takes a whole Saturday and there were nineteen jars on the table cooling on a cloth.

Bucky came in through the kitchen door, which was open because it is always open in September, and he did not eat any jam. I want to be completely accurate. He put his front feet on a chair, put his nose on the edge of the table, and moved the cloth about four inches, and two jars went off the end and onto the floor.

I was there. I was the only one there. Dad was outside and Mrs. Ames had gone home an hour before.

And here is what I said when Dad came in, and I have thought about every word of it since.

I said: Bucky got in and two jars went on the floor.

Every single word of that is true. He did get in. Two jars did go on the floor. There is not one false word in that sentence, and I said it in a slightly upset voice, which was also true because I was upset.

What I did not say is that the kitchen door was open because I had gone out to get the little rake and had not shut it, and that I was standing four feet away with my back to the table doing something else when he came in, and that I had heard the chair go and had not turned round fast enough.

Dad said poor lad, and picked up the glass, and told me not to walk about with bare feet for a couple of days.

I got about two hours out of that. Two hours of being the boy who was there when the goat got in, instead of the boy who left the door open, and at supper I put my fork down and said the rest of it, and I did it badly and got about half of it out and then the other half.

Dad thought about it for a bit and then he said the thing I have kept, which is that half a truth is a whole job, because you have to remember which half.

The verse is about delight and not about rules

The proverb has two halves and they are not opposites in the way a person expects.

Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight. (Proverbs 12:22)

The first half is what everybody remembers. The second half is where the whole verse lives, because delight is not the word a rule uses. A rule says permitted. A rule says acceptable.

And notice the phrase in the second half is not they that speak truly. It is deal truly, which is a word about transactions and about the whole shape of what passed between two people, rather than about the words in the middle of it.

You are being looked at by somebody who is delighted rather than merely satisfied. Proverbs 12:22 uses delight as the counterpart to abomination, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being enjoyed instead of as clearing a bar.

A person can say only true words and still deal falsely. That is not a technicality and children understand it long before adults admit it, because a child who has done it knows precisely what they were doing at the time.

You have not fooled anybody about which half you left out. The written word chose a word about the whole dealing rather than about the sentences, and His Spirit is what makes that specific in the mind of somebody who arranged something carefully.

What the arrangement costs to run

There is a line in the Psalms about the kind of person who gets to stay, and one of the items in the list is unusual.

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. (Psalm 15:2)

In his heart. Not with his mouth. The psalm has already covered the mouth elsewhere. This is about what a person is saying to themselves, on the inside, at the same time as they are saying the true words on the outside.

Because that is the actual cost of a half truth, and it is not the risk of being caught. It is that a person has to run two accounts at once, and they have to keep them separate, and they have to remember which one everybody else is looking at.

You are able to run one account instead of two, and Psalm 15:2 describes that as a place to dwell. The Spirit of God is what makes a single account read as rest rather than as exposure.

And there is a promise attached to the whole psalm which is worth noticing: he that doeth these things shall never be moved.

You have been offered somewhere to stand that does not require maintenance. Psalm 15:5 attaches stability to the dealing rather than to the getting away with it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from an idea into a boy at a table with a fork down.