We cannot get away from our past. It’s always the stepping stone to our future–what happened yesterday genuinely affects what happens in our life today.
From childhood on, the results of past events are indelibly drawn into our actions today, either positively or negatively. I believe the past is a great teacher, perhaps the greatest teacher of all, if we’re open-minded enough to look at it objectively and to consider our mistakes and our triumphs–because our past is filled with both.
There are many of us who whine about our pasts. We blame our present lives on what’s happened to us before. In other words, we haven’t learned how to use our past to create a better life for ourselves. Then there are some of us who may take too much pride in our past–our wonderful childhoods, parents who loved us and were able to provide what we needed. Sometimes the good past is as detrimental to our future as the less than good past . We may become arrogant, thinking we’re superior to others.
We must learn to use whatever we’ve experienced so far in order to further our success in life and our success in becoming the person God intended us to be. Because whatever has happened, God allowed to happen–as a textbook for our future on Earth, and for our eternal life.
So, we don’t want to burn our foundations. We want to use them to build a house, a life, that we can live in–a house with mirrors in which our reflections look happily back at us. A house in which God lovingly lives, side by side with us, no matter our negative or positive past.
Translating a World on the Edge 