Time and time again I have been talking with my girlfriends and this particular question always comes up.. “Why can’t we let go of our past”? Of course as women we all think we have the world figured out and the answers to everything. But have you ever really sat and wondered why we can’t let the past go?
We have all experienced a bad break up. You fight, you breakup, you reconcile, you get back together, and guess what the cycle starts over. But why do we keep fighting to stay in the past? Why can’t we close that chapter of our lives and start a new one? Reliving the past is like putting on yesterday’s dirty underwear again today.
For a year I lived in the past. I couldn’t let it go. I wanted what I used to have but I also wanted what was to come. I would keep dwelling on it and hang on to that little hope that things were going to change. But I quickly learned, people do not change… they alter. Getting over a painful experience is like the monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move on.(C.S. Lewis) This quote is so true. If you don’t let go of the one you are currently hanging from, you will never make any progress.
You know why it’s so hard for us to be happy? It’s because we refuse to let go of what makes us sad. You see your old boyfriend with someone new and you hold on to what you used to have. But did you ever stop and think, if he was worth keeping you would still have him? You didn’t make the team and hold a grudge against a friend who did, but did you condition hard enough to make it? We hold on to so many bad things in the past that we are missing what God has waiting for us ahead.
Gossip is the best form of clinging to the past. We spend so much time worrying about what someone did yesterday or who is dating who or who did this to that, instead we should look to tomorrow. Every second becomes the past. You can’t change it. You can’t relive it. You have to watch it become apart of your past and added to yesterday’s chapter in the book we call “Life”.
Many people think that holding on is a sign of strength. In my opinion being strong and brave enough to let go shows much more strength. Life is so sacred and we waste so much of it trying to control situations in the past that we can’t change. Eventually we have to wake up a realize that nothing can become what it needs to be until we are willing to let go of what used to be. The best thing about the past is that is shows what we don’t want to bring to our future.
I used to think my life was right where it was supposed to be. Until one day, God came in and flipped my life upside down. Here I am a husband, a house, a new state, gained a new family, and my walk with Christ is stronger than it has ever been. But I would have missed all of God’s blessing if I would have kept clinging to the past.
When the past call. Let it go to voicemail. It has nothing new to say.
Lacie 