Walking With Christ

Proverbs 18:17 The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.(ESV)

For more than twenty years, I carried the weight of something I’d said during one of the darkest periods of my life. I believed my words had contributed to a terrible outcome. I replayed those events so many times that the conclusion became inseparable from the memory. Eventually, I stopped questioning whether my understanding was correct. I simply accepted it as part of my history.

The event was real. The pain was real. The words I’d spoken were real. But the conclusion I’d drawn from them?

That was something else entirely.

It took more than two decades for me to begin seriously examining the difference.

When an Interpretation Becomes a Memory

Our minds are remarkable things. We can remember an event, examine the circumstances surrounding it, and construct an explanation that seems perfectly reasonable. The trouble begins when we stop recognizing the difference between what happened and what we believe happened.

Something painful occurs. We search for a reason. We examine what we said, what we did, what we failed to do, and what we might have done differently. Then we find an explanation.

Perhaps it isn’t the right explanation. Perhaps we don’t have enough information to reach any conclusion at all. But the explanation fits what we know, and that makes it convincing. So we accept it.

Over time, we stop saying, “I think this is what happened.” Instead, we say, “I know this is what happened.” Eventually, we may not even remember that there was a distinction.

The interpretation becomes part of the memory itself. And once that happens, questioning the interpretation can feel like questioning our own experience. But those aren’t the same thing.

A memory can be genuine while the conclusion attached to it is completely wrong.

The First Witness

Proverbs 18:17 offers a remarkably simple observation about human judgment.

The first person to present a case often sounds convincing. Their explanation makes sense. Their evidence appears sufficient. Their conclusion seems reasonable. Until someone examines it.

We tend to apply this proverb to disagreements between people. One person tells a story, another provides additional information, and suddenly the situation looks different. But what happens when the first witness is ourselves?

What happens when we’ve spent years presenting the same argument inside our own minds?

We know the circumstances. We remember the emotions. We can recall the words and the consequences.

Surely, if anyone understands what happened, it must be us. Except we’re not impartial witnesses.

We have fears, assumptions, insecurities, desires, and experiences that influence how we interpret events. Sometimes those influences help us understand what happened. Other times, they lead us toward conclusions the evidence doesn’t actually support. And because the explanation came from our own minds, we may never think to cross-examine it.

For years, I was both the witness and the judge in a case against myself. I presented the evidence. I supplied the interpretation. I delivered the verdict. And then I lived under the sentence.

What I hadn’t done was seriously question whether the evidence supported the charge.

When the Disciples Already Knew the Answer

In John 9, Jesus and His disciples encounter a man who’d been blind from birth. The disciples ask a question that reveals something important about their understanding of suffering.

John 9:2–3 (2)And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (3)Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.(ESV)

Notice what the disciples assumed. They didn’t ask whether the man’s blindness was caused by sin. They asked whose sin had caused it.

Their question offered two possibilities, but both depended on the same underlying conclusion. Someone must have done something wrong. They’d already decided what kind of explanation was required. They simply needed Jesus to identify the guilty party. But Jesus rejected the premise.

Neither the man’s sin nor his parents’ sin explained his blindness in the way the disciples assumed. Their reasoning may have seemed consistent with what they believed about sin and suffering. It may even have sounded religious. That didn’t make it correct. And this is where the passage becomes uncomfortable.

We can ask God questions that already contain conclusions He never gave us.

We can spend years asking why God punished us for something without first establishing that He punished us at all. We can ask why someone betrayed us when we haven’t established that betrayal occurred. We can ask why we failed when the outcome was never ours to control. The question itself can become a trap when it assumes something that isn’t true.

The Difference Between What Happened and Why

This distinction has become increasingly important to me. There are things in my life that I regret. Words I wish I’d never spoken. Decisions I’d make differently. Moments when fear, pride, insecurity, or anger influenced my judgment.

I don’t need to pretend those things never happened. I don’t need to excuse them. And I certainly don’t need to rewrite my history to make myself look better. But acknowledging that I did something wrong doesn’t automatically establish that I caused every painful event that followed.

Two events occurring in sequence doesn’t prove that one caused the other. A terrible outcome doesn’t establish that someone deserved it. And the fact that an explanation feels convincing doesn’t mean the evidence supports it.

Those distinctions sound obvious when we’re discussing someone else’s life. They become considerably harder when we’re examining our own. Especially when guilt has been involved.

Guilt can make an explanation feel morally necessary. We may believe that releasing an accusation against ourselves would mean refusing to take responsibility. But responsibility requires truth.

Accepting blame for something we didn’t cause isn’t humility. It’s accepting a false conclusion. And refusing to examine that conclusion doesn’t make us more accountable. It simply leaves us carrying a burden that may never have belonged to us.

When New Evidence Challenges an Old Verdict

Recently, I encountered information that forced me to reconsider a conclusion I’d carried for more than twenty years. It didn’t change what happened. It didn’t erase the loss. It didn’t make the words I’d spoken any less regrettable. But it challenged the connection I’d drawn between those words and the outcome that followed.

For years, I’d treated that connection as established fact. Now I had reason to believe the outcome had been shaped by circumstances already in motion before I’d spoken.

That realization didn’t give me a new past. It gave me a more accurate understanding of the past I already had. And I found myself confronting a question I should’ve asked a long time ago.

Why had I been so willing to accept an accusation against myself without examining whether it was true?

Perhaps because the accusation fit what I already believed about myself. Perhaps because guilt felt more appropriate than uncertainty. Perhaps because having an explanation, even a terrible one, seemed easier than admitting I didn’t understand what had happened.

I can’t claim to have perfectly untangled every part of that experience. But I can recognize that I’d spent years treating an interpretation as though it were evidence. And those aren’t interchangeable.

The Responsibility to Examine What We Believe

Christians are called to pursue truth. That responsibility doesn’t disappear when the subject becomes uncomfortable. It doesn’t disappear when examining a belief might force us to admit we’ve been wrong. And it certainly doesn’t disappear when the belief concerns our own lives.

1 Thessalonians 5:21 but test everything; hold fast what is good.(ESV)

Paul’s instruction occurs in the context of testing prophetic claims, but the principle reflects a broader biblical concern for discernment rather than uncritical acceptance.

We should be careful not to turn every feeling into a revelation, every coincidence into a message from God, or every painful consequence into evidence of divine judgment.

Sometimes we don’t have enough information to explain what happened. Sometimes we have enough information to reject an explanation but not enough to replace it with certainty. And sometimes new evidence reveals that something we’ve believed for decades was simply wrong.

That isn’t a failure of faith. The failure would be refusing to examine the evidence because we’ve become more committed to our interpretation than to the truth.

The Story Isn’t Finished

I can’t change the events of twenty years ago. I can’t retrieve the words I spoke. I can’t undo the pain that followed. And I can’t reclaim the years I spent carrying an explanation that may never have been true. But I can decide what I do with the understanding I have today.

I can examine the conclusions I’ve built around other painful memories. I can question assumptions that have survived simply because they’ve never been challenged. I can become more careful about assigning motives, responsibility, and blame. And I can refuse to confuse what I believe happened with what I can actually establish.

Perhaps there’s something in your own history that deserves the same examination. A relationship you believe you destroyed. A failure you believe defines you. A tragedy you’ve interpreted as punishment. A moment when you decided what someone else thought of you, or what God must’ve thought of you, without ever having enough evidence to know.

I’m not suggesting that every painful conclusion is wrong. Some of them are entirely correct. Some of our regrets are justified. Some consequences really do follow from our decisions. But the truth doesn’t become less important simply because examining it might be painful. And an accusation doesn’t become true simply because we’ve believed it for a long time.

The past doesn’t change when we discover that our understanding was wrong. But the future can change when we stop allowing a false understanding of the past to govern it.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether we remember what happened. Perhaps the question is whether we’ve ever seriously examined the story we’ve been telling ourselves about what it meant. And whether we’re willing to let the truth correct us. Even after twenty years.