Your worst past was preparation for your best future.

The past is the past. Who or what we used to be doesn't matter anymore. What matters is who and what we are now and who and what we can become in the future.

Don't accept your present state in life as final, because it is just that, a state.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

within the institution, breaking out into new worlds, leaving behind the shrine which had become a place of worldly power and resistance to his purposes.

They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

One of the great New Testament words is Now. That was then, this is now.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.

Leave the broken, irreversible past in God's hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.

Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.     Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.

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.

Dec. 31… "Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.