3 Ways to Move Past Your Past

You’ve invested much of your time – your life, it feels – into something and in the end you ask yourself the question: “Was it all for not?”

We’ve all been there. We know how it feels. It hurts. It’s confusing and frustrating.

But, more than anything, you demand reimbursement for a piece of your life you feel was stripped from you. But what about the flipside?

How would your life have turned out had it been invested elsewhere? They say, life is greener on the other side – but is it, really?

I mean, maybe we’ve just spent our time investing in all the wrong things. Or maybe we invested in the right things but in the wrong time. With the wrong people. In the wrong situation.

Or maybe it was the heart in which we invested.

Let’s talk through this.

It’s the what-would-have-beens. The coulda-woulda-shouldas.

This scenario has once been paved before each of us. It is us.

It is the DNA that rattles through our bones.

And after it’s over, we’re left asking questions – a million questions – that only leave us more frustrated: What if I would have made this choice instead of that choice? Should I have married that person instead of the person I married? If I only had invested my time here instead of there, I would have [fill in the blank _____________].

Unfortunately, there isn’t anything we can do to change our past.

But here are three things that we can do to propel us into making better choices for our future.

1. We accept our past.

Whatever it was that you were doing that you didn’t want to do or found yourself in, just accept it. There isn’t anything you can do to change it.

Focus on your future instead.

C.S. Lewis once said, “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

POSTED ON November 27, 2013

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Bo Lane is the founder of ExPastors, a community that strives to offer help, healing, and hope for expastors, pastors, and church leaders, and author of Why Pastors Quit. As a media professional with more than 15 years of experience, he has developed marketing and brand strategies that have revolutionized churches and businesses, both large and small. Bo left full-time ministry after serving more than a decade in churches in Oregon, California, and Iowa. He is also a writer, filmmaker, woodworker, husband and father.