Do you ever find yourself rewriting history? I know I did. I remember during the early stages of healing after discovery I spent a lot of time doing just that. I began looking back over our married life and second guessing what was ‘really’ going on. I remembered a few times when Wayne had come home later than expected. At the time I had thought that he had been in a wreck or some such equally tragic scenario, only to find him breezing in the front door, wondering why I was so frantic. He would tell me where he had been, and tell me not to be such a drama queen. I would feel a little silly, then we would go on with our day. As many of these moments came back to my mind I began to suspect that I had not been a drama queen at all, and that while he had indeed not been in a car wreck during those moments of panic, he had been busily wrecking our marriage.

I will never know if my suspicions are true regarding those specific moments or not because his memory is very cloudy regarding specific details on how the timeline of his secret life lined up with our life together. This left me in a difficult situation because of my very active imagination. Given the amount that he remembered and was able to tell me, along with my memory of our life together, I was able to come up with all kinds of nightmarish conclusions about our past. Not only did I come up with possible scenarios (which felt like absolute truth rather than possibilities), I also had a new view on what his intentions had been towards me throughout our life together. Suddenly even my happy memories became targets to be rewritten into sad ones as I imagined what he was really thinking or feeling in them. I wondered if he ever really loved me, or if it had all been an act. I wondered if he had ever been happy as I had been.

I found that a certain amount of history rewriting is necessary. Certainly there was a reality that I had not been aware of. I needed to be aware of that truth, and come to a place where I could accept that it was a part of our history. Acceptance wasn’t just something that I did in my mind because I needed to; it was a truth that my heart had to accept as well. Accepting the truth of our past was a process that took a while for my heart to fully walk through. By the time my heart finally reached a place of acceptance, my mind had formed a habit of rewriting history in a negative light. The Liar offered me many lies regarding all of my memories with Wayne. Because I had just been forced to accept a new reality it was difficult for me to discern the difference between what was true about our past and what wasn’t, so I had to learn a new way to rewrite it. I began to ask the Voice of Truth what was really going on in my memories. Sometimes what I was told was difficult to hear, but it was rarely as horrible as my imaginative mind had come up with. The sweet thing about the Voice of Truth is that when He has to give painful information He always sends His comfort to heal the hurt that His words may bring. I found that the safest way to rewrite history is through the filter of His Voice, because only in it will I find truth and comfort.