Tag Archives: liars

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Locked-In To Lies

We are inundated with lies. We all decide what we do with them.

I used to think it was the same decision for everyone:

*When you know it’s not true, you toss it out.

*When you don’t know for sure, you wait on proof – you know, the way jurors are required to do. Whatever turns out to be lies, you toss it out.

*When you believed a lie at first, and then facts came in that disproved it, you toss the lie and keep the truth.

Pretty simple, right?

We’re taught it as toddlers. It is reinforced in school. It is required for work. Churches teach it is a trait of God himself — God is Truth. And lies? Well that’s easy, they preach: Lies are from Satan, the father of lies.

Most simply put:

Truth is right. Lies are wrong. Don’t lie.

But now I know we don’t all make the same choices about lies.

Some actually choose them. And add to them. Then add some more.

Church people, who sat in the same pews and heard that to love God is to obey God, promptly disobey him and one of his commandments in favor of lies.

They don’t love him.

They too read Proverbs 9:10, about reverently fearing the Lord: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding”, then instead of pursuing wisdom and understanding, they grabbed their treasured lies. “Don’t take this away, it’s my everything, it’s my priority, it’s my treasure, it’s my god.”

They don’t fear him.

When someone confronts deceivers, they trash the person who is questioning them. Then add some more lies, now about the person who knows they are lying. Because …

Anyone who knows the truth about a liar is the enemy of that liar.

When facts and evidence start to roll in, deceivers refuse to alter course. Instead, they double down. They dig in. They lock-in.

They search out people to confirm them, agree and double down with them, and attack whoever dares still shine a light on their now elevated lies.

No matter the mounding evidence that their lies are … just that … frickin’ lies, they remain committed to them.

“Final answer?” the game show host queries. “Final answer”, they declare.

“Lock-in your answer” the game show host directs. And they lock-in another lie.

Those people. Those people who are committed to lies. They are in our homes, and at family and friend gatherings. They are our neighbors, classmates, and coworkers. They are our pastors and our store clerks. They are our nurses and policemen. They are our lawyers and PTA members. No title or degree, no lifestyle or alliances reveal who the lovers of lies are.

Observation tells us who the lovers of lies are.

Once you know, you know.

And then what?

If you care enough about truth, if you value facts, if you live your own life to tweeze out and discard each and every lie, and keep only facts …

Then you change your relationship with liars.

Each one is uniquely involved in your life, so each one is handled differently.

It’s critical that you do it well. If you don’t, every little compromise of the right way to handle it opens a crack to allow their lies to infiltrate your own mind.

So how do you do it well?

With wisdom.

If you haven’t been valuing wisdom, you’re late to navigating life well. Wisdom takes time, experience, and an open mind to always learning. It starts with a little bit of wisdom in your own personal storehouse labeled “wisdom”, and grows to bigger and bigger piles of it.

If you keep at it. It’s lifelong work.

Wisdom doesn’t come easily, it comes in the tough stuff of life. It requires staying strong enough to learn when all you want to do is wilt into a pity party. You don’t get to pamper yourself when the class of wisdom is in session. You don’t get to play victim to rally others to pamper you, when the window of wisdom is open.

If you’ve been doing the high road stuff, the strong stuff, the hard stuff, and foregoing taking it easy so that you can gain wisdom, because you value wisdom that much …

You’re on the right track to dealing with lies and liars.

If you haven’t been doing that, it’s yet another choice in this life of choices.

Do you want to become wise, to handle life as effectively as possible? Then choose to do it, and plan on it being work. It’s not acquired by osmosis. It’s not a passive infusion that crosses your brain barrier from those who have worked hard for it to lazy, self-indulgent you. It’s damn hard work. It’s yours and only yours to do.

If you don’t choose it, then you are choosing the opposite of wise. That’s called fool.

The choice is yours.

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Exoneration

On this day of Michael Cohen’s public hearing before congress, it is the thing called truth that is on my mind. First, though, I want to disclose that my observations of truth have been in the making for many years. In the most upending time of my life, I discovered how truth is targeted, and how easily it can be obscured.

A person I knew for nearly two decades, first demonstrated the degree to which some people will hide and spin truth to avoid personal accountability for egregious wrongdoing.

This person I knew so well had something to hide. He knew I knew what that thing was.

He turned upside-down and inside-out to create a coverup. He caused many relationships to unravel and splinter. He told people his victims caused the unraveling. More than anyone, he focused on me. He ran his newly created lie by me, trying to make me believe it. I considered it, to keep peace and prevent the destruction of our world, but I immediately felt I was selling my soul to call lies true and truth lies. Though it was hard to imagine that anything could be worse than our sudden destruction, it turned out that there was:  it was abstract, and I can’t explain it well, but when I entertained accepting his lies, I found myself at the edge of the pit of hell, and felt the chill of it.

Truth can be extremely painful, but the lies originating from hell itself are death to those who embrace them.

It was a close call, but I opted to stay with truth. That is when a part of him emerged that I never knew existed:  somebody had to have caused the destruction that happened, so I was assigned the blame. He took his story to people ahead of what I might say. Though I never exposed him, he couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t, so he sacrificed me to save himself. To do proactive damage control, he represented me as a villain to strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family, a thing I still have trouble wrapping my head around. I never dreamed he could be so cruel, so inhumane, so unjust. Instead of acknowledging himself as the operator of the “wrecking ball” of our demolished lives, he claimed I released that wrecking ball. Which if you knew the thing that he did, isn’t plausible, but lies can be that desperate.

Why did I end up being the unlucky, chosen accused? Because I was the one person who knew the truth of what he had done and called it wrong.

People like him have no problem throwing innocent people under the bus. They have no conscience about doing great destruction to the lives of others. They do what they do, and if there is a negative fallout, or they are exposed, they look for someone to cast the blame onto. Often, that is the people who are in their current inner circle — they know the most; they see the most; they know the truth, so they become the focus of the perpetrator.

From the day of their exposure, this kind of guilty person creates lies, and builds on it as time goes on and new circumstances can be woven into their story. If their witnesses help them hide the truth, all is well, but if somebody dares to expose the truth … watch out … everything changes. That’s how people move from “trusted confidant and friend”, or “loved family member or spouse”, to “despised enemy” in a moment’s time.

In the story created by the guilty, those who know the truth and call it wrong must be vilified. 

Many liars maintain a “lie-at-all-cost” stance even when caught in the evidence and proof of their shameful deeds. They reach a point when they actually believe their own lies; they believe themselves innocent. I even suspect their longtime, voluntary mental habits sometimes result in involuntary, diagnosable mental disorders.

They target their witness to discredit. They call their victim the liar. They rewrite the story and spin current events so that the perpetrator appears, at the least, justified in their actions. They frequently are intentional about self-marketing, creating a positive public image, which is easy enough to achieve:  be seen on the right side of causes; join a church or similarly-respected and visible group; behave well in public; make sure every noble act is paraded before as many people as possible. They use any means available:  legal or illegal, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical.

At the same time, they drop innuendos or blatant fabrications about the one who knows the truth:  they paint over the exposer’s rightful reputation with a brush dipped in dark stain, and keep staining, and staining, and staining until their reputation is totally darkened.

More than anything, they deny their wrongful deeds were done. They deny, deny, deny. They alter dates, and times, and involved people, if they can. They change the facts and impose those lies onto people who don’t know enough, or at all, to discern correctly.

People who have something to hide often go to the greatest lengths to not let the truth be exposed. Truth is their enemy. 

For those of you who have been victims of such a person, you have my sympathy. The greater the abuse, the greater your loss. For those who have suffered great losses at the hands of a chronic and persistent liar, I recognize that you have been put through hell. You have been slandered. A great injustice has been done to you.

Still ….

Do not be tempted to get revenge.

I’m not suggesting you not defend yourself legally, or any of a number of responses that you may find yourself needing or having to do. I am saying:  Don’t count on people to ask for your side of the story. Don’t count on people to even realize that they can’t know a story that they didn’t witness, that they must hear from you to have any chance at sorting through what is true and what is not. People simply do not like to wait — they like to grab the quick and easy conclusion to spare themselves the time and energy it requires to investigate a thing to its truth. Many even like to dislike you, they actually want to hear the lie that stains your good reputation.

So people are not who you are waiting on to give you your “fair hearing”, so-to-speak. More often than not, your desire for it is metaphorical, but as we saw in today’s literal hearing for Michael Cohen, even if you have your day in court, people are going to do what people do:  they look for confirmation of their existing biases. Not all people, but unfortunately, many, many (maybe most) people will do that.

So don’t look to people for your ultimate justice.

God is the one who will exonerate you, regardless what legal judgments or people in general conclude about you. He will do it, if He sees that you are relying on Him alone.

If a vulnerable, innocent person came to you, and depended completely on you, and you had the wholeness of righteousness and character that God has, wouldn’t you help that vulnerable and innocent person? He/ she is not turning to others, he is turning to you for help. He is not attempting to regain his stolen reputation on his own; he may have been denied exoneration through that avenue anyway; he is not seeking revenge; he is not stooping to do to his abuser what was done to him; he is consistently taking the high road.

If an innocent person like that came to you for help, and you had the power to, you would not rest until you had exposed the lies and exonerated that innocent victim.

In the same way, God will help you, and will not rest until He has exposed the lies against you. He will exonerate you. If — and I repeat if — you refrain from getting revenge or pursuing exoneration on your own. If you do, that is reliance on yourself or people, and not on God.

Divided reliance results in incomplete restitution. Recovery will be limited by the power and laws of man.

Wholehearted reliance on God results in complete restitution. Recovery will be according to the unlimited power and laws of God. 

If our imaginary vulnerable person only stopped by your house asking for help, but then decided to go out on his own instead, you’d be left at your door watching him leave, knowing he didn’t genuinely trust in you. You wouldn’t force yourself on him; he has free will to turn his back on you.

But if he came in and sat at your table, and crashed on your spare bed, and woke up in the morning with eyes swollen from crying, and day after day he stayed, depending on you to make it right for him … you would surely do it.

If you put your reliance completely and solely on God, He will be faithful to aid you until justice is completed on your behalf.

On this truth, you can depend. How do I know? — It happened to me.

  • Hebrews 10:30

    30 For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.”

  • Leviticus 19:18

    18 “ ‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.

    Proverbs 20:22

    22 Do not say, “I’ll pay you back for this wrong!” Wait for the LORD, and he will avenge you.