What kind of world would unfold if smart, determined people lived as if Jesus really was the source of truth? That question shapes a new book by my friend Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries. “Truth Changes Everything: How People of Faith Can Transform the World in Times of Crisis” is a book badly needed right now.
As Jeff writes, even among Christians, the percentage who believe truth can be known has shrunk to around 50%. Seventy-five percent of young adults say that they are unsure of their purpose in life, and fully half agree that there is “no absolute value associated with human life.”
Yet, despite this depressing but accurate picture, “Truth Changes Everything” is full of hope. After all, Christians in every time, place and age have faced trials, setbacks and difficulties, most greater than our own. Yet, in the midst of those moments, the light of Christ shines brighter still.
In one example particularly relevant on the heels of COVID-19, Myers describes how Christians faced the bubonic plague in 14th-century Europe. One-third to one-half of Europe’s total population died during the Black Death, and as one contemporary wrote, “One man shunned another … kinsfolk held aloof, brother was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers.”
Yet, in the face of this calamity, many Christians lived differently. St. Catherine of Siena was an example of someone who, when the plague reached her city in 1370, cared for its victims, changed linens, provided food, prayed and listened to deathbed confessions. As Myers reports, the mortality rate for clergy at this time was far higher than the general population, but their lives launched a revolution in medicine that laid the foundations of our modern hospital system.