I was hurting.

I was crying out to God for relief, and eventually I sat down and started writing.

I didn’t organize my thoughts.

I didn’t try to make them sound reasonable.

I definitely didn’t try to make them sound spiritual.

I just wrote what I felt.

And it was ugly.

There was hurt in those words. Anger. Fear. Frustration. Maybe even a little Hate. Things I wouldn’t have said out loud. Conclusions about myself, other people, and the situation I was in.

But they were honest.

When I finished, I could look at the page and say:

This is how I feel.

And yet, I wasn’t free.

I was still hurting.

Still carrying the same emotions.

Still wanting God to give me relief.

So I started looking more closely at what I had written. I began pulling out the themes I was wrestling with and searching Scripture to see what God said about them.

And somewhere in that process, a question stopped me:

What is truth?

Was everything I had written true simply because it was an honest expression of how I felt?

Some of it came from things that had actually happened.

Some of it came from things people had actually done.

The pain was real.

The emotions were real.

But did that make every conclusion I had written true?

That was different.

I began to see that there was a difference between:

What happened.

How I felt about what happened.

And what I had come to believe because of what happened.

Then I came to Jesus’ words:

“If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

John 8:31–32

I had heard that verse before.

But this time I was coming to it with pages full of everything I thought and felt.

So I started comparing what I had written with what God had said.

And something changed.

Not the situation.

Me.

As I discovered what God said was true, the emotions I had attached to those beliefs began to loosen their grip.

The hurt hadn’t suddenly become okay.
I wasn’t happy about what was happening.
Nothing had magically resolved.

But I had peace.

And I remember recognizing the significance of that.

The circumstances hadn’t set me free.
Getting everything out on paper hadn’t set me free.
Understanding every detail hadn’t set me free.

Truth had.

For me, Jesus’ words suddenly felt very real:

“The truth shall make you free.”

I wasn’t free from what was happening.

I was experiencing freedom in the middle of it.

And that made me want to understand truth more deeply.

What had I believed simply because I felt it?
What had I concluded because of what I experienced?
What voices had I allowed to define me?

And most importantly:

What does God actually say is true?

Maybe that’s a question worth asking before we assume that everything we feel—or even everything we have good reason to feel—gets to define reality.

Because our pain can be real.
Our emotions can be real.
Our experiences can be real.

And God can meet us right there with truth.

The situation may not immediately change.

We may not suddenly become happy about it.

But sometimes, right in the middle of circumstances we desperately want changed, something else happens first.

Peace.

And for me, that was the beginning of understanding what Jesus meant when He said:

“The truth shall make you free.”

That experience led me to dig deeper into Scripture and became the study: The Truth That Sets Us Free.