“Don’t dwell on the negative. Program your mind with what God says about you and a transformation will take place.”
~Joel Osteen
We all have past regrets and past pain that we have to live with. We may have even been dealt a bad hand in life that was beyond our control that still haunts us throughout our journey. We tend to go over it in our heads about what we did, what we should have done, what we could have done differently, or what was done to us that we allowed to happen, and we get stuck in that repetitive cycle. Without realizing it, we carry that pain with us and we sometimes stay stuck in our mistakes and we end up hindering our own progress by living our lives with the thoughts of that pain and those mistakes in our minds.
We don’t mean to, but we allow our past to dictate our future in such a way that we actually hold ourselves back. We don’t want to be hurt again so we just don’t allow anyone in and we don’t trust. We don’t want to keep making that same mistake so we become overly cautious to the point of not really living. We don’t want to get rejected as we have been in the past so we just stop trying altogether. We wear those mistakes like a badge of bravery as something to take with us on our journey, something to toughen us up, and we don’t even realize that what we are really doing is settling into our regrets and reliving that past pain constantly. All this does is hold us back in our past instead of moving us forward into our future.
I know that for far too long I let my childhood and the emotional and physical abuse that I endured from my mother hold me back from moving forward. At times I even used it as an excuse for some of the big mistakes that I have made in my life. I have, at different times in my life, used what my mother put me through in my childhood as a reason that I didn’t try to achieve certain goals, all because she said I never would. I have allowed that past pain and my past mistakes to make me so cautious as to not be hurt again or to not make any more monumental mistakes that I end up missing many opportunities. It is true that I couldn’t really control what happened to me as a child but all of the choices made as an adult were mine and mine alone. I got stuck in my past and for so long it kept me from progressing towards my future.
Everyone has something that they regret and that they would go back and change if they could or a past pain that they would erase if given the chance. In order to succeed in accomplishing our goals and our dreams we can’t keep allowing ourselves to be stuck in the mistakes of our past or the pain that we’ve been put through. We have to use those things for the lessons that they are and transform those teachable moments into opportunities to grab ahold of the destiny that God has promised to us. We can’t control the things that have already been done to us but we do have the power over our own choices as to how we move forward into our future. Don’t settle into your past, there’s nothing left there anymore to go back to!
Jimmetta Carpenter
Writer/Editor
The Diary: Succession of Lies (Now Available)
Writing as “Jaycee Durant”
http://unpleasantlyplump.wordpress.com/
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