leave your past behind

Have you ever believed that you could fulfill God’s destiny or purpose for your life if you could just leave your past behind?

 

In Nehemiah 2:3, Nehemiah describes to the king who he served as a cupbearer, that he was sad because Jerusalem, the city where his fathers were buried, had been burned by fire. He was so distraught by the burning of the city that he wept and fasted, then asked the king for help in rebuilding the city wall.

I find it interesting that Nehemiah’s “destiny task” to rebuild the wall came out of a personal connection—a very personal connection to a city with a familial history.

This is often how destiny–or purpose–often works: It often begins with a personal connection to a person, place, happening, memory, feeling, or experience that has deeply touched us.

In her Bible study Esther, Beth Moore shares how we often want to amputate our history from our destiny. It would be a whole lot easier if we could leave our pasts behind, right? After all, there are messy things back there. Ugly things. Skeletons in closets. Broken dreams. Dashed expectations. Disappointments. Personal and corporate disasters. Things that have left question marks in our souls.

Listen up. It’s precisely these unfortunate things God uses to create passions that fuel destiny and purpose.

For example, a very talented doctor I know in Colorado Springs treats the U.S. Olympic wrestling team by keeping their spines in tip-top shape. She shines in her profession. As a child, she was ill for years because the natural curve in her neck had become inverted from a drop on the head as a baby. When a chiropractor discovered and corrected the problem, the havoc caused to her central nervous disappeared, and she was healed.

A very personal connection to the pain of illness shaped Dr. Kristin’s passion to become a chiropractor.

You can’t amputate your history from your destiny.

My dear friend, Judi, passed away in 2009 from a brain aneurysm, but I can still hear her laughter in my mind. We loved speaking to one another in English accents in which we sounded like the Queen of England and called each other “dahling” and used words like “mahvelous” and “lovely.” Judi was one of the warmest, funniest people I have ever known.

One day when I spoke with her, she told me that her father was a police officer and that when she was little, he would often come home in a bad mood, and when he added alcohol to cranky, it wasn’t pretty. In an effort to calm her dad, she would try to make him laugh.

Out of a very personal connection to this often-repeated painful situation, Judi’s humor was watered until it grew into something that blessed many. Over and over at her memorial service people said, “Judi could always make me laugh.”

You can’t amputate your history from your destiny.

I hope you are see that destiny–or purpose–are often birthed out of very personal connections that have moved us in our histories. These personal connections can be anything in which we have found meaning.

So, before you start running from your past and want to amputate your history from your destiny, remember that very personal connections in your history are the very things that God will use to shape you for His glory.

 

Shana Schutte