The Facts are not Equal to the Truth

Valerie Cullers 25 Comments

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When you think about your life, do you focus on the negative facts about it? Were you raised in poverty? Did your mother or father leave your family? Have you lost a business, an election or had to declare bankruptcy? Did you not have much of a formal education? Do you suffer from a physical or mental disability? Do you focus on these facts and believe that they are the sum total of who you are?

I just want you to know that the negative things that have happened to you do not define who you are. They are NOT the sum total of who you are. In other words the facts about your life are not equal to the truth of who you really are. Those negative things are just a part of the story of your life, they are not the totality of who you are. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at a few examples:

This man was born into poverty. He had about eighteen months of formal schooling. He failed at his first business. He lost eight times he ran for public office. He was estranged from his father. He battled depression for most of his adult life. Who was he? Abraham Lincoln. We all know that he was not the sum total of the negative facts about him and he made one of the greatest contributions to the history of our country.

This man was born into poverty. His parents were on the run from the authorities for the first few years of his life. He lived as an immigrant in a foreign country during those years. He worked as a skilled laborer. The last few years of his life, he lived as a transient. Who was he? Jesus. I don’t need to tell you the contribution he made to the planet.

Just remember one thing: THE FACTS DON’T EQUAL THE TRUTH. 

The truth of who you are is so much greater than any negative facts about you. Everyone has negative things happen to them. It is only part of the story of their lives. The truth about each one of us is far greater than any negative aspect about us. If we want to be productive people, we need to focus on the positive things in our lives and not focus on the negative things that have happened to us. When we do this, we can live our lives knowing that the facts about us don’t equal the truth of who we really are!positive-455580_640image by geralt. courtesy of Pixabay

 

25 thoughts on “The Facts are not Equal to the Truth”

  1. Truth, in the Biblical sense, is that which is reliable. (I looked that up in the Anchor Bible Dictionary in the 1990s.) A statement can be factually accurate and still be false. It can be a product of cherry-picking.

    Your example of Jesus reminds me of an identical point I heard on a broadcast of “Presbyterian Survey” on the now-defunct VISN cable television channel years ago.

    When PBS’s “Frontline” series broadcast “The Killer at Thurston High,” about Kipling Kinke (who killed his parents and others in 1998), that episode prompted a response from a youth minister. He stated that one is more than the worst thing one has ever done.

    Yet, as Shakespeare had Marc Antony say in “Julius Caesar,” “The evil men do lives after them/the good is oft interred with their bones.”

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  4. very dense, rich text. I think that the negative aspects of our lives should be, as far as possible, relativized so that they can be transformed into experience and not into a burden, but that the positive aspects overlap and they. I believe that the sum of our experiences allows us as human beings to build a better life and a better world.

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