The more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died.

Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.

You have come to realize that you must leave it (the old country) and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? You are being asked to trust that you will find what you need in the new country. That requires the death of what has become so precious to you: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise.

The years that lie behind you, with all their struggles and pains, will in time be remembered only as the way that led you to your new life.

Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead. Philippians 3:13

Let go of yesterday.

I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.

It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials. Through every cloud He brings our way, He wants us to unlearn something.

God wants to wipe away your past and lift your burdens. Do you let Him?

Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

Oh, 1994, April 27. There won't be a day like that ever again. I mean, the sky was blue, with a blueness that had never been there before.

W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.