I’ve always loved the smell of sweet honeysuckles in the summer. Playing in the woods or fields you would always find them. We would pick the pale yellow or white blossoms. Next we would bite the end off and the sweet honey would be a delight. Southern summers would not be complete without honeysuckle blossoms.

But honeysuckles have a “dark side”. They are aggressive. Left to themselves they will take over a wooded lot or field. They wrap themselves round and round any sapling or plant they come in contact with. Sometimes when you cut away the vine, deep grooves are left in the tree’s bark. Scars of what damage that honeysuckle vine can do.

If the honeysuckle grows among flowers or other delicate plants, when the gardener tries to pull them out, the garden is destroyed. Even when you carefully cut the vines, they can still leave destruction behind.

I think honeysuckles are like falsehood and half-truth.

Most of us have the discernment to recognize a bald-face lie. In like manner, we can recognize truth. It’s when lies, or half truth is mixed in with the truth that things get complicated.

We listen and think, “Yes, that is truth…but that next statement is not.” If we attempt to correct the deception, we find ourselves like the gardener trying to remove honeysuckles from his flowers. Damage. Wounding. Argument. Loss.

And many times, the deception is such a jumbled up group of untrue statements mixed in with the true statements, we don’t know how or where to even begin to sift out the truth. Like a bed of honeysuckle vines taking over a forest of young trees, where do you begin?

Voices of deception have always existed. In this day and time, we just have so many more voices coming from so many places. Who do we listen to?

I try to hold statements up against the truth of God’s Word. If it violates God’s Truth, it is not truth.

Falsehood is just as destructive as those honeysuckles strangling the life out of small trees. But let’s remember to speak Truth in love. Truth should never be used as a weapon either.

Our words matter. I want to choose them wisely.