The Edited Version Of My Own Life

She has told it about sixty times and she could do it in her sleep, and last month she heard herself and stopped dead in the middle of it.

Not a long pause. Half a second. Nobody noticed and she carried on and finished well and people were kind afterward.

But what happened in that half second was this: she reached for the next part and found she genuinely could not remember whether the thing she was about to say was what happened, or what she has been saying happened.

Because there are two versions and she has been running one of them for eleven years.

In one room she takes out the part about her family, because it makes people awkward and once, years ago, somebody said something that she has never forgotten. In the other room she takes out the part about the night everything changed, because they would not know what to do with it and it would be all anybody talked about afterward.

So each room gets a story with a hole in it. Different holes. And the two holes are the two halves of her, which is the joke of the whole thing and she has never once found it funny.

And she is not a liar. Nothing she says is false. She has simply been handing out an abridgement for so long that the unabridged one has started to feel like something she made up.

You know that half second.

Maybe you have a part you take out at work. Maybe there is a part you take out at your mother's. Maybe you have told a version of yourself so consistently that you would have to sit down with a pen to reconstruct the actual sequence.

And you did not do this out of cowardice. You did it out of consideration, mostly, and out of tiredness, and because a story that lands badly costs you a fortnight of small awkwardness and you have only so many fortnights.

She did not edit anything

Here is a woman who had far more reason than you to leave things out, and what she actually said when she ran back into her town.

Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?John 4:29

All things that ever I did.

She led with it. That is the extraordinary thing. Her story had material in it that the whole town already used against her, and she went back to those exact people, and the headline she chose was the part she had most reason to bury.

And notice how she frames it. Not: he forgave me. Not even: he knows about it. He told me all things that ever I did, which is a sentence about being fully seen, and she says it as good news, in public, to the people it would cost her most with.

You are known all the way through, and every part you edit out has already been heard once by the only one whose hearing settles anything. That is what she is saying when she says all things that ever I did (John 4:29), and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as searching all things, even the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10), which is the same total knowledge turned toward a person and not against them.

What the editing has actually been costing

Now the practical part, because there is a cost and it is not the one you think.

You have assumed the cost is honesty, and it mostly is not. Nothing you have said was false and you are not carrying a lie.

The cost is that you have been the only person who has ever held the whole shape. Every room has a fragment. Not one human being in your life has the complete outline, so there is nobody who can reflect it back to you, which is how a person normally stays sure of their own history.

That is why you lost your place mid sentence. Not because you are dishonest. Because nobody has ever confirmed the original.

You have been carrying the entire outline alone, and that is a weight rather than a sin. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, the one who comes alongside, which is precisely the position nobody in either room has been standing in.

Nobody here is telling you to tell everybody

Let me be extremely plain, because a page like this is one bad paragraph away from doing real damage.

Nothing here tells you to stand up in either room and give the unedited version. Nothing here tells you to raise any part of your history with any person. There are rooms where discretion is wisdom, and there are rooms where a thing said would land on somebody who did not ask for it, and you know which is which and this page does not.

You are not being sent anywhere, and no part of this asks you to disclose one thing to one person. The word says a wise man's heart discerneth both time and judgment (Ecclesiastes 8:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that discernment to a person about their own life, which is a thing no article has ever been able to do for anybody.

The whole assignment is smaller and it happens with nobody else in the room.