After 25 years, truth or consequences remain the choice.
Had we known then what we know now, we'd have chosen truth regardless of the pain.
Pain is short-lived when truth is involved. When denied, the consequences create a pain much harder to absolve.
Denied truth soaks into our souls and like a parasite lives off of what should be love and tenderness.
If we truly are an emotional bank account, truth will increase our respective value. Denying the truth will only create a leak which we cannot repair.
After 25 years it is so painful to finally understand the true "cost" of our lies. The happiness lost, the integrity lost, the kinship found in truth, lost. Why??? How could we have not seen this? We are both discouraged and embarrassed to reflect back with the knowledge that we lost that which we cannot replace...TIME. Time is already too precious and like so many good things, fleeting--the older we get, the faster the funnel. If we live in sin or incongruently, we will only lose control and we find our good memories vaporize, often with only the negatives standing out.
As we ALL only pass this way once, we should pass on to those we can influence and love to live in truth...regardless of the pain.
Otherwise, we live with the consequences of denial. We both thought, "in the short-term, this too will pass". But it didn't. It didn't until we faced our fears.
We didn't face our fears until we'd damaged each other through fantasy, and escape with others. The times we did connect were real, but without the foundation of truth, we were subject to the wims of deceit, denial, and discouragement.
Funny how our worse fears occured anyway. We rejected each other--insidiously at first--with subtle changes in how we dealt with each other and our "issues". Better to sweep them under the rug, eh?
Our worse fears manifested into full blown hostility and anger and probably did damage to our children--even though we thought we were cagey about it all...maybe that's why we aren't on the "A" list with different people we've met over the years also--because they could see our relational phantom.
Truth ultimately brought us to today. While we both live in pain, it is pain we let deeply root and will take time to resolve. But today, we know that the alternative way of living is not worth the consequences of the lies we lived for so many years. Let truth rain, and let truth reign.
Truth or consequences...how are you living? Do you need to go through what we did to get your lives at least back on some track? Or are you hard-headed and stubborn and proud, and unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others???
Let truth reign in your life and watch the pain subside...or face the consequences of time slipping by with nothing to do but repeat the past.