The thing is, we use past relationships like maps to navigate new ones. But it doesn't work that way, because every human, every relationship is different. It's like trying to use a map of Las Vegas to get around Vermont. It won't work. That's why so many people get lost.

The past makes a good bishop but a poor king." "What does that mean?" I said. "It means that it's good to take counsel from the past but not to be ruled by it. Otherwise we end up using today to fight yesterday's battles and miss tomorrow's promise.

Some own up to their past. Some are owned by their past. The wise take what they can from the past and then leave it behind.

Regret is a useless emotion: it's like brushing your teeth after you find a cavity.

Too many times we lose today's battles because we're still engaged in fighting yesterday's.

people spend their entire lives wishing for a second chance to do what they should have done right the first time.

Regret is a useless emotion.

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it. God's purpose is not limited by your past.

C. S. Lewis observed, "The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become — because he made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Get rid of your old self, which made you live as you used to — the old self that was being destroyed by its deceitful desires. Your hearts and minds must be made completely new, and you must put on the new self, which is created in God's likeness" (Ephesians 4:22 — 24

It's in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.