The Story Has Been Told So Often It Became Who She Is

She tells it well now.

That is the difficult thing to say and it is true. Twenty-two years of telling has produced a version with a proper shape: a setup, a turn, and a line at the end that always lands. People are moved by it. It is not exaggerated and she has never added anything false.

And somewhere in the second decade it stopped being something that happened to her and became the thing she is.

You can tell because of what happens when it does not come up. In a room where nobody knows it, she is uneasy, and she will find a way in, and the finding of a way in is smooth and practiced and she does not notice herself doing it any more.

That is not a fault and I want to be careful, because the alternative that gets suggested is usually that she should let it go, which is not a thing a person can do to their own identity by deciding.

Isaiah has an instruction about this and it is stranger than it first appears, because of what he says two verses earlier.

He tells them not to remember, right after reminding them

Here is the instruction.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

And here is what sits eighteen verses earlier in the same chapter: a detailed recollection of the sea, the waters, the chariot and horse, the army and the power, all of which are the former things, deliberately rehearsed.

So God spends part of a chapter remembering something and then instructs them not to remember it. That cannot be a contradiction, which means the instruction is not about memory in the ordinary sense.

What is being addressed is where the attention lives. Not: lose the information. Something closer to: stop making it the load-bearing item, because something is about to be built and the old thing is standing where the foundation goes.

You are not being asked to lose the information. Isaiah 43:18 comes after a chapter that rehearses the same events, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who guides into an accurate account rather than an emptied one.

The reason is in the next verse and it is a construction reason

The instruction has a behold attached to it and the two verses are one sentence in effect.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19)

Now it shall spring forth. Present. Already beginning.

Shall ye not know it? That is a question, and it is a slightly worried one. He is asking whether they will recognize it, which implies that they might not, and the reason a person misses something springing up in front of them is that they are looking somewhere else.

That is the whole argument and it is not moral. It is practical. The old thing is not being confiscated. It is competing for the attention that a new thing needs in order to be noticed at all.

You are able to notice something springing up, and He asks whether you will. Isaiah 43:19 puts the question in as a question, and it is by the Spirit, John 16:13, who guides rather than leaving a person to catch it themselves.

A way in the wilderness is not a rescue from it

The image He uses is worth having exactly, because it is not the one people assume.

I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.

Not: I will take you out of the wilderness. A way in it. And rivers in the desert, which stays a desert, with water running through it.

That matters for somebody whose story is genuinely what happened. Nothing is being undone. The wilderness is not being reclassified as a garden, and nobody is being told the account was smaller than it was.

What is described is a route through the same terrain and a supply inside the same dry place, which is exactly the offer, and it is much better than a revision.

You are offered a way through the same ground rather than a different account of it. Isaiah 43:19 says a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, and it is by the Spirit, John 7:38-39, who is named as what the rivers of living water were spoken of.

What Paul says about the old things

The New Testament version of this is one verse and its middle clause is usually rushed.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Old things are passed away. The verb is about something going by rather than about something being deleted, and the tense describes a state that has come about rather than an event a person performed.

And the behold is there again, which is an attention word both times, and the sentence ends with all things having become new rather than with the old having been destroyed.

So the arrangement is consistent. In both places the old is described as having lost its position rather than its existence, and in both places the reader is told to look at something.

You are a new creature, and the old is described as having gone by rather than been deleted. 2 Corinthians 5:17 uses a passing-away verb and ends on all things become new, and it is by the Spirit, Titus 3:5, who is named as the one doing the renewing.

The name underneath the story

If the story has become the identity, then the question is what is underneath it, and the same chapter of Isaiah answers that eighteen verses before the instruction.

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Isaiah 43:1)

I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.

That is the load-bearing item being offered in place of the account. It is not another story. It is a name and a possession, both of them stated by somebody else, neither of them dependent on anything that happened.

And notice it comes first in the chapter. The name is established at verse 1 and the instruction about the former things does not arrive until verse 18, which is the right order: nobody can put down a load-bearing thing until something else is holding the weight.

Nothing here asks anybody to stop telling the truth about what happened, or to contact anyone, or to do it on a schedule. If what happened is still happening, or if it has got to the place where you do not want to be here, say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You have a name established eighteen verses before anything was asked of you. Isaiah 43:1 says I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine, and it is by the Spirit of adoption, Romans 8:15, that the belonging in that sentence is made a person's own.

What the sentence does to a story

The physical action on this page is one kind true sentence about the other person, and it belongs specifically to this article for a reason.

A story that has become an identity has a shape, and the shape requires the other person to be a particular size in it. Not a lie about them; a compression, where the parts of them that do not serve the account have been left out over twenty-two years, because they were not relevant to the telling.

One kind, true sentence is not a revision of the story. It is a fact about the person that the story has never had room for, and saying it out loud puts one item back that the shape has been excluding.

Do that a few dozen times and the account is still true and no longer the whole of anything, which is a much smaller and more achievable thing than letting it go.

You are able to put one true item back rather than having to let anything go. Isaiah 43:18 addresses where attention rests rather than what is remembered, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 5:5, that the love which finds a kind true thing is shed abroad rather than manufactured.