The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I believe that sometimes we tell ourselves certain things because we can't have full conversations with another party. When I say “another party,” I'm trying to be nice, but I mean our partner. When the conversation is no longer there, the relationship has broken down. There's no conversation. There's only the idea of what we think this person is doing or the idea we have about why this person is doing something.

We tell ourselves that we're right because we know our partner. We feel it in our bones and in the blood that is coursing through our veins. We feel it that strongly, and yet we're just sitting here telling ourselves lies because we don't know—and can't know—what that person is doing or what they're feeling unless they are telling us. To misinterpret our partner's actions and believe the things we tell ourselves is to condemn our relationship through our thoughts.

Sometimes the greatest thing God can do for us is untangle the web we've created in our own minds. Our way of thinking twists things, justifies things, and convinces us that what we feel and what we're doing makes sense, even when it's keeping us in bondage, keeping us away from the one we love, the one we truly love.

The devil is a liar, and he creates that lie to separate us from what we love, the same way he does with our relationship with God. Then he sets inside us the idea that there's no going back: what we've done is unforgivable, what we've allowed is unforgivable, and what they've done is unforgivable. That may be the furthest thing from the truth, but we don't know because we're holding on to a lie that we told ourselves.

We shouldn't become so comfortable with the lies we tell ourselves and the ones we've learned to live with that we become afraid of the truth that could set us free or give us back someone we love.