The Way Forward

The new ministry year has arrived and many of us as leaders are looking toward the future. However, a common tendency when launching into the new year can be to leave the unresolved pieces of last year unattended.

For many of us, 2007 was a pretty challenging year. Wrestling with alternate facilities, feeling over taxed, ministries being changed or released, friends moving on, frayed relationships, feeling alone or frustrated. What do these things have to do with the way forward? 

In short, the answer is found in the fact that not fully coming to terms with the realities of the past keeps us stuck … it limits our ability to move forward and subsequently limits our future.

Not releasing certain attachments to things can keep us from properly connecting to the new things that God has for us (Isaiah 43:19). Such attachments may include: our own personal agenda, resting on past achievements, settings that we have outgrown, or pain from unrealized expectations. We may not think of it as such, but the process of letting go of things we were once attached to is called  … grieving.

Deliberately opening ourselves emotionally to things that have happened is the way through grief. Ignoring the issue isn’t. Learning from the past, and letting go of attachments allows us to be open to present realities and be fully available to the future.

Contrary to some thinking that suggests we should simply ‘leave the past behind’, Dr’s Cloud and Townsend** suggest that ‘Past, present and future are aspects of our soul that need to be reconciled to God. It is blatantly wrong to teach that we should just forget the past, for the simple reason that the past will one day be our entire life’. 

Even beyond our collective church stories, hurts and losses, we can find that our personal past can also keep us stuck emotionally and spiritually if we do not grieve it well.

Whatever it is, unresolved emotional ties to things from the past can and will keep us stuck in the present.  Tell tale signs of being stuck include:  

• Isolation and hiding (“I am not good enough and don’t deserve…”)
• Going through the motions (“Leave me alone to do what I know…”)
• Using spiritualisation to dodge what’s real (“But God told me…”)
• Reliving or burying the bruising of the past (“Someone owes me…”)

We cannot change our past, but we can change our internal connections to the circumstances that have pained us or the people that have injured us (whether it be a little or a lot), by letting go, forgiving ourselves or other’s and learning from our past.

”I’m so sorry” … ”Can we start over?” can be amongst the most powerful words we can utter. At that point we release our demand that something must be made up to us. We take our living hurts from the past to God and to people. We confess our pain, express our grief, seek reconciliation and look for better ways into the future. 

Though none of these processes change the past, they nevertheless redeem the past. God has always been in the business of redeeming the past, empowering the present and giving hope for the future. It’s why the apostle Paul is able to say in Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Our future together is tightly tied to the way we are holding our past. Can you become unstuck? Bring your history to God and others, whether it happened two days, two months, two or twenty years ago. Allow His light and grace to transform it, bring His truth in on it, and experience the sense of being reconciled to your ‘whole’ life.

This is the way forward.

** Inspiration and references : Drs Henry Cloud & John Townsend; 12 Christian Beliefs That Can Drive You Crazy; Chapter 6