Henry Cloud

It is wrong to say that we should just forget the past, for the simple reason that the past will one day be our entire life. Past, present, and future are aspects of our soul that need to be reconciled to God. We must take our living hurts from the past to those who can heal them. We can bring to light patterns we have learned from our parents and other adults, confess those destructive patterns, disagree with them, and repent from them. If we have wronged people, we must confess our sin, apologize to those we have hurt, and make amends. Though none of these processes change the past, they can redeem the past. God is in the process of reconciling everything that has gone wrong, including our personal past. But in order for him to deal with our past, we need to bring all of our broken parts to him.

 

Eugene H Peterson

Restore what needs to be restored. Ask for forgiveness where needed so that we can go on and share the gift. Our inability or our unwillingness to do that is, I’m sure, what produces a lot of our “dis-ease.” A symptom, perhaps, yet it’s also evidence of our frantic attempts to grasp for joy, to share joy, and to give joy to others instead of first going back and doing that basic homework of the heart that is central to our lives, where we forgive and are forgiven and where we find God’s love and then learn how to share it. Hard preparation produces easy enjoyment.