History— that’s the defense I most often use to judge.  History is the argument I present when evading the process of forgiveness.  History gives me ample reason to justify responding to someone’s sin with more sin.

 

“Well, historically, they haven’t been the best at controlling their tongues…”

“They have never been consistent about paying me back, so I don’t want to enable them by giving to them anymore.”

“In history’s past, they have backstabbed and backslid, which is why I don’t think it’s wise to sow into them.”

 

We are humans bound to recollection but freed by redemption.

 

We are forgiven but we never really seem to forget.

 

History is the one thing that can never change, and it’s the one thing that I judge most harshly on.

 

But history is the one thing that Jesus doesn’t hold me or anyone else to.

 

So why do I?  Why do we?  Why do we hold on deliberately to the past and allow it to negotiate our future?

 

My mind wanders to one of the most trying relationships in my life: the one with my father.

 

One of the most difficult parts of our relationship was the history. He had seen me make poor decisions and treat people poorly for so long, that when I became a Christian, he didn’t seem to believe that change was really possible.

 

The things that I had done leading up to my conversion did not resemble the faith that I had just adopted.  Even my behaviors in the days leading up to my salvation were behaviors of a broken and hurting young woman.

 

When I converted though, I changed, because God changed me.

 

The change was immediate.  So many of the nasty habits that I once lived by disappeared in the act of repentance.  I knew that I was living my life in a way that I no longer wanted to live it, so most of my bad habits disappeared when I conceived faith.

 

Some of my issues dissipated immediately, while others took weeks and months and years to disappear, but either way, change was evident.

 

Change was evident to everyone except my father.

 

I begged him to see the new me and to reset the clocks in our relationship to start anew, but he was never willing to see me differently.  To him, I was the same person before Christ that I would be after, and I could never grow out of who I once was.

 

My father had a different belief system than me, which made communication difficult.  Where I saw salvation and forgiveness, he saw history and doubt.  When I argued change in Jesus, he argued that Jesus couldn’t change me.

 

I was tied to the mistakes that I had once made, never to be free from who I had been.

 

It left me feeling trapped.  It felt as if my father tied a ball and chain to my feet and tossed the new me into the bottom of a lake.  There was no amount of works or proof that was evidence enough of the redemptive works of the cross.

 

My hurting heart tried to argue with his failed reason.“I didn’t even really hurt him.  I hurt other people and he didn’t even know about most of it.  He’s blaming me for things that didn’t happen to him.”

 

Whether his trauma was real or just perceived, it was still his reality.  It was still valid.  Whether I sinned against him or sinned against others and his hurt came through osmosis, his pain was still real.  His heart was still hurting.  No amount of excuse-making could pardon that.

 

Eventually, I had to step up and take responsibility for my role in it.

 

However, I came to the table with expectations.  I came expecting to repent and apologize, and for him to meet me in my humility and return to me what I was giving to him.  I expected that my spiritual change would change him, encouraging him to accept Jesus into his heart and follow in my footsteps.

 

When it didn’t, I was crushed.  When a broken man acted broken, I was surprised; I was shocked, hurt, and confused.

 

Instead of taking responsibility for his wrongdoings, he threw up the past in my face. As I kept apologizing, he kept finding more and more things for me to apologize for.  My heart broke because my fears of never being good enough were realized.  I wasn’t good enough before salvation and I wouldn’t be good enough after.

 

He was bound by the hindrances of history while I was freed by the clemency of Christ.

 

That pain of rejection haunted all my relationships.  Because the rejection of my father cultivated a crop that so many others before him sowed, I reaped failure and rejection in all my relationships.

 

I never believed that I was good enough, so I attracted people that also believed that I was not good enough.

 

The vicious cycle of abuse continued for years after I walked away from my relationship with my father.  The untruths that were reaped in my name— “you’re not good enough,”; “you’ll never change,”; “you’re just like your mother,”— were harvested by me in my lack of self esteem, and I brought them into every relationship I had.

 

I let people walk over me, I let people steal from me, I gave myself away, all because I believed the words spoken by someone who remained in the past.

 

That hurt of being judged by my past defined me.  It became who I was.  I hardly ever talked about it, but I wore it my heart for everyone to see.

 

After years of counseling, inner healing, and abandoning what I had been taught for what God was trying to teach me, I finally moved out of that bondage.  Even with God, it took me close to a decade to finally let go of those past perspectives of unworthiness and move into the present promise of change.

 

I was different: I was made new.  I was valuable and I was worthy, and I was not held down to the sins of my past.  God knew it, I knew it, and people who truly sought out my heart knew it.  I was finally free to live in the future that God had promised because I stopped allowing others to hold me in my past.

 

I was freed and I was liberated, but I found myself falling into the same destructive habits that others once used to chain me down.

 

I was freed from the debt of the past, but so often, I held others to a different standard.

 

History became an excuse to give up on people.  When people didn’t change or didn’t repent or didn’t apologize— when the carousel of pain that they were on kept spinning— I gave up on them, arguing that they would never grow up and get off. I found myself making justifications for my sins and shortcomings and blaming my issues on others.  

 

I used “wisdom” and “discernment” as justifications to give up.  I used “godly” excuses to walk away from people.  I found myself looking to a person’s past to determine their worth rather than looking to their future.

 

I had become exactly what I had spent years trying to get away from.

 

Where being judged on my past hurt and hindered me, I hurt others in the same way.  When history was once used as an excuse not to love me or fight for me or forgive me, I turned around and used that very same excuse to not love and support others.  Instead of just believing in the good in people, I believed in what I saw, and gave no mind to what I could possibly see in their future.

 

So many times, I trapped people in the box of what I thought of them and refused to acknowledge when they broke out of it in glorious righteousness.  I was no better than what I had grown up in.  I was no different than those who had hurt me.

 

I had to learn to balance wisdom with forgiveness. I had to learn to temper my discernment with an understanding of grace.

 

People should not be made slaves to their past.  No one deserves to be held to what they were.  Everyone can change.  Everyone has an availability to grow.

 

I understand the desire to protect your heart.  There is nothing wrong with that.  I understand that you cannot give yourself away completely to people who will only ever take.  I understand that healthy boundaries are necessary.

 

But boundaries are different that forsaking someone for their history.

 

I encourage you to stop holding other people to who they once were, and I encourage you to stop holding yourself to who you no longer are.  Through repentance, we are made new.  Through redemption, we are no longer responsible for carrying the remnants of our sin.

 

You deserve better than to be treated like the person you once were.  Your coworker deserves better than that too.  Even the addict in your life deserves better.

 

You may feel trapped.  You may feel like that one relationship will never get better and that they will never change and that they will only keep hurting you— but don’t give up.  Create healthy boundaries and hope and believe that God can heal them in the same way that He has healed you.  The history that they had in unforgiveness and lack of change doesn’t determine the future that they can have in grace and in freedom.

 

If you feel trapped by your own mistakes and wrongdoings: if your past is littered with addictions and abortions and abandonments, trust that the Lord is not holding you to your history either, and that, through the act of repentance and redemption, you are free.

 

You are free.  Your father is free.  Your mothers and brothers and sisters and children are free.  The people that hurt you and the people that you hurt are free.  We can all be free because of the great gift of salvation that is offered to us all.

 

Because Jesus came in and relinquished us from the death sentence of sin, we are no longer responsible for the things that we were already forgiven for.

 

Don’t sell yourself or anyone else short.  Verse after verse in the Bible tells us that God “blots out our transgressions”, proving that we, who are made in His image, can do the very same.

 

You are not you past, and neither is your drug-addicted son.  You are not the mistakes you once made, nor is your disapproving father.  Everyone deserves to be seen for who God sees them as, not for who their history says that they were.

 

I encourage you to start over.  With Jesus, let go of transgressions that lay before you, both ones that belong to you, and the ones that belong to others, and choose the freedom that is found in the spirit of forgiveness. Live in the present, looking to the future, not the past.

 

You are not your history.