Because Truth Has Never Been the Enemy

What becomes freedom for one person may become another person’s wound.

One of the hardest lessons healing has taught me is this: What becomes freedom for one person may become another person’s wound.

I didn’t fully grasp it until my own story tested it.

When I finally sat down at seventy and wrote Bones Beneath the Prairie—no outline, just raw obedience—I thought I was simply laying down decades of shame. Every chapter felt like chains falling away. Telling the truth became a cleansing of my soul. Light was finally touching places that had lived too long in shadow.

What I did not anticipate was the other side of that same truth.

For some of the people I love most, my words reopened wounds they had spent years trying to close. The private pain, the childhood echoes, the sense that I had chosen an audience over protecting them. My memoir, and every essay that followed, became another injury rather than the freedom I had found.

They stepped back. Blocking. Silence. Empty spaces where family once lived. The loss is real on both sides—raw, mutual, and deep. I have grieved it in ways I never expected.

And still the lesson remains: Truth can reopen wounds before it begins to heal them. That doesn’t make it the enemy.

My faith in Christ has never asked me to remain silent in the face of evil. It does not reward silence that protects abusers and wounds the next generation. It calls light, light. It calls evil, evil. It does not promise that obedience will preserve every relationship. Sometimes the cost is heartbreaking. I know that now.

So I keep writing—not to wound, but because other women are still suffocating in the same darkness. I keep choosing honest forgiveness: one that hates what was done without pretending it wasn’t done. The chains of generational silence are heavy. They clank loudest when one person’s freedom collides with another person’s pain.

Both realities can be true at once.

If you are carrying a story you know needs to be told, but you fear the cost, hear this: You are allowed to lay down your burden even when it shifts the weight onto someone else. You are allowed to choose light even when it exposes old shadows. The grief that follows is honest. Sit with it. Cry the real tears. Then write the next sentence anyway.

Because truth has never been the enemy.