I read an intriguing quote from Katherine Wolf, author of Treasures in the Dark recently. She wrote, “The past is a fact, but the way I tell my story is a choice.” As a writer, these words caught my attention, but as a person, the rest of the message resonated with a truth I knew but hadn’t heard articulated in quite such a way before.

Most children today grow up having faced at least one childhood trauma. Many face multiple traumas before they enter the school system anything from hunger or homelessness to death of a loved one, assault or abuse.

Since the Fall, life has been difficult. It is how we frame those difficulties that determines how we move forward or even if we do. We’ve all met those who continue to blame their past for the way they act in their present – those who are stuck and unable to change because they can’t or won’t let go of the traumas experienced in their pasts.

I’m not discounting the extent or horror of what they went through. What I’m saying and what Katherine Wolf so eloquently stated is this. “The facts of what happened to us matter far less than the way we remember what happened to us.” We can choose to reframe the story in hindsight, mining it for all the treasure and refining it produced rather than the evil of the moment.

In other words if we choose to focus on the light rather than the dark, we can train our brains to expect and anticipate goodness in our futures rather than tragedy and darkness. This mindset transformation changes our narrative from “it’s never worked before” to “this time will turn out better than the last time (or times).”

That isn’t to say I subscribe to the idea of continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different result. But I do believe that when we fail and fall or sink, the most important thing we can do is get up again. And part of how we kneel then stand then move once we’ve experienced a let-down, a failure, or a take down is to tell ourselves that if we try one more time, this time the outcome will be different. Without that glimpse of hope – the silver lined cloud, the light at the end of the tunnel, the candle in the dark – however you like to think of that God-given spark we visualize, we’ll like in the mud until life tramples us into the worthless thing we believe we are.

That’s why I choose to tell my story – and my stories – with a focus on hope in the midst of despair and  sunrises on the horizon. What about you? Do you find yourself focusing on the dark details of your story or do you reframe the past into a tapestry of light?

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