The Day I found the Truth on the Back of a Photograph

What I thought I knew. What really happened. And what a wrecked Buick taught me about grace.

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The Day the Buick Died

Memory is a funny thing.
It’s not that it lies exactly.
It just… edits.

More like an impressionist painting than a photograph—blurring edges, shifting shadows, filling in blanks with feelings instead of facts. We remember what felt true, and sometimes that’s enough to build a whole narrative. Until it isn’t.

Take the 1968 black Buick Skylark.

It wasn’t mine, technically, but in high school I drove it like it was. To school, to work, to nowhere in particular with the windows down and the music up. Then one day, it was gone. Totaled.

And I knew the story.
My younger brother had crashed it.
I could picture it—the skid, the pole, the wreckage.
I carried that story for years.
And with it, a quiet resentment.

Then, decades later, I found a photo. The front end was smashed just like I remembered.
But on the back, in my mom’s handwriting: “Darlene hit a deer.”

My sister.
Not my brother.
Not a pole.
A deer.

Everything shifted in a sentence.
The version I’d carried all those years? Gone.
I called my brother to apologize.
He laughed—had no idea I’d been upset.

He was fine.
I was the one who’d been stuck.

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That’s the thing about the stories we carry—we think they’re anchors, but sometimes they’re just weights. And we don’t always notice how heavy they’ve become until we let them go.

Kierkegaard once said, “When you label me, you negate me.”
I’d labeled my brother. Labeled the memory. Labeled the past.
But the label wasn’t the truth.

Czesław Miłosz said memory is inaccurate—not because we’re dishonest, but because remembering is always editing. Memory isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s a workshop. And we’re always sanding and reshaping.

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Scripture cuts through all of this in a way that still stuns me:

“In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.” —Proverbs 16:9
“We live by faith, not by sight.” —2 Corinthians 5:7
“Everything that does not come from faith is sin.” —Romans 14:23

It’s not about moral perfection—it’s about alignment.
Sight will trick us.
So will memory.
But faith helps us walk when the picture’s blurry.

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The Buick is long gone.
So is the grudge.
What’s left is the better story.

Not the one I made up—but the one I discovered when I was willing to turn it over.

I’ve misunderstood more things than I care to admit. But grace doesn’t ask me to be right. It just asks me to stay open.

So here’s what I really learned in high school:

• Memory is not a map.
• Certainty is overrated.
• Grace starts with, “I might be wrong.”
• And sometimes, the truth isn’t a pole. It’s a deer.

Walk gently.
Love well.
And for heaven’s sake—check the back of the photo.

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