Since childhood, I have been drawn to unusual things.

I do not remember what I wanted to possess, but I remember what I longed for.

When I was about seven years old, I encountered a word that would quietly accompany me throughout my life:

soul.

No one explained it to me. Yet somehow I knew what it meant.

To me, it was not merely precious. It was the most precious thing of all.

I felt responsible for it. I wanted to keep it beautiful, pure, and holy.

From that moment on, my life took a direction.

Everything I loved—books, music, beauty, nature—was cherished because I believed it could nourish the soul.

As the years passed, another expression gradually joined the first.

A single heart.

A heart undivided.

A heart whose beginning and end are one.

A heart that does not become one thing before God and another before the world.

Without fully realizing it, I had begun searching for such a life.

In time, I encountered Jesus.

At first, I listened to His words.

Later, I contemplated His life.

Eventually, I found myself captivated by His very being.

In Him, I saw something I had been longing for all along:

a life wholly given,

a heart undivided,

a person who never betrayed what He loved.

I did not merely admire Him.

I recognized something in Him.

Something I had loved long before I possessed words for it.

Years later, I would discover a Hebrew word:

אֱמֶת (Emet).

It is often translated as truth.

Yet the more I reflected on it, the more I sensed that it meant something deeper.

Truth not merely as correctness,

but as faithfulness.

Integrity.

Wholeness.

The steadfast refusal to betray one’s deepest center.

It seemed to describe a life that begins in its source, passes through all the depths and contradictions of existence, and reaches its end without abandoning what it was from the beginning.

And when I looked again at Jesus,

I realized that His entire life appeared to me as a living Emet.

The Hebrew letters themselves began to speak.

א Aleph whispered of origin, unity, and the great silence before all words.

מ Mem spoke of life’s depths, its tears and mysteries.

ת Tav stood like a final seal, asking:

“In the end, how did you live?”

Together they formed Emet.

Beginning.

Journey.

Fulfillment.

Looking back, I realize that my life has not truly been a search for many things.

It has been one long search under many names.

Soul.

Beauty.

A single heart.

Truth.

Jesus.

They seemed different at first.

Yet all of them flowed from the same hidden spring.

Today I know many things that I did not know before.

Yet strangely, I have also become more aware of how much remains beyond my understanding.

This no longer feels like a deficiency.

It has become a spaciousness.

A place where mystery can dwell.

Where wonder can breathe.

Where longing can remain alive.

And where God is free to be God.

So I continue walking.

Not to possess the truth,

but to become more faithful to it.

Not to become extraordinary,

but to remain single-hearted.

Not to acquire more,

but to lose nothing of what I first loved.

To begin in the Source,

to journey through all the depths of life,

and, in the end,

to remain true.

אֱמֶת.

Perhaps that is not only the name of truth.

Perhaps it is also the name of the life I have always desired to live.