Tuesday we spent the day on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain. We were neither here, nor there. Not in Vermont. Not in New York. We were in international waters! Well … not exactly. We were in sub-national waters. Or something. But we were on an island that was not subject to any state law. Very interesting. We didn’t break any laws, so it didn’t matter.
We spent the day with LightHusband’s sister, her husband and their blended family. There was fishing, swimming, hot dogs, hotdogs, wet dogs, a temporary aquarium for the caught fish, an adventure on a tube, and sundry other activities … all law abiding. 
I got to have several really good conversations with LightSIL. We re-connected again. It was good. But something she said has been rattling around in my head for the last couple of days. We were talking about some of her interactions with her first husband and working out custody arrangements. Things get dicey sometimes. She mentioned some boundaries she needed to set that were entirely for her children’s safety. Her ex-husband is a practicing alcoholic and the court has set some stringent standards for his behavior that she needed to remind him of. She said, “I didn’t want to threaten him, but he needed to remember what would happen.” I reminded her that she wasn’t threatening him; if he broke the standards set by the court, it was the court which would take action against him, not her.
I’ve really been thinking about that interchange for the last couple of days. I’ve been thinking about how truth appears to people. Some people see truth and it’s clean and clear for them. They welcome it into their lives as a measure with which to measure themselves against. They face truth without fear. Others, see truth walking toward them and they pull out the fun house mirrors in an attempt to bend it and manipulate it and make it into something they can control for their own purposes. If they cannot bend the truth, if they are faced with a truth they cannot manipulate, then they manipulate those around them. But in the end I’ve come to realize that the only people who are threatened by the truth are those who want to manipulate it for their own ends.
