Truth
“We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.” – William James
I always remember that Jack Nicholson line in “A Few Good Men”, “you can’t handle the truth”. That is what this quote reminds me of. Fact is a reality and truth is a perception of that reality.
It is hard to separate out facts from our truths. That is why we should never be married to “one” truth. As we grow, mature, and expand our learning we see things that we believe to be true, no longer serve us. If we are married to those beliefs it stops our growth right there and we stagnate.
If we change the meaning of an event, our brain responds to that new meaning and truth is thereby altered. For example you see someone you know who is married or in a relationship sitting in a restaurant hugging and hanging on a man you don’t know. You could assume that this person is having an affair and make a judgment about that. Later you could learn that this man was her brother. Now you have some facts that change the truth that you were believing.
I believe that this is how someone can have an experience which we would assume to be an experience that would make them a victim, yet they are not a victim. They have changed the meaning of the event, and by doing so they have altered the truth so that they were not the victim. They turn the event into the gift of learning how to go through the fire of tribulation and come out the other side stronger than they were when it began. To me this is what makes us all hero’s in our own lives – that we realize that we have ultimate control over our own lives.