past on Actions

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Gracious God, how often we have withheld a word of kindness, of truth and of love. We have lifted our voices in quick criticism rather than gracious encouragement. Through our actions and inactions we...

Elizabeth Elliot's story of forgiveness started in 1956 on the banks of the Curaray River in Ecuador when her husband and four other young missionaries were attacked and killed by members of the H...

Joseph’s brothers, meaning to harm him, sold him into Egypt, but in reality God sent him there so that he could save Jacob’s family and many others from death by starvation Robert E. Longacre, J...

Author David Seamands once wrote, “Children are the best recorders but the worst interpreters.” I remember a lot about being a kid. I remember colors and moments, arguments and smells… Though my me...

The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...

My husband, Doug, is an athlete whose body is protesting. He has had numerous knee injuries and torn his Achilles tendon twice. Doctors have operated on him, put casts on him and sent him home, thereb...

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our at...

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past.”

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs ...

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!  Let the dead Past bury its dead!  Act,—act in the living present!  Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Too often we are given a choice—emotions or faith and belief. Yet as Dan Allender and Tremper Longman observe,  Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open ...

Repentance resulting from self-examination is a lifelong endeavor, occasionally surfacing in the public or private act of confession as an act of “courageous memory” in recalling one’s past.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.

The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.

Learn from the past, prepare for the future, live in the present.

Leave the broken, irreversible past in God's hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

“What’s past is prologue.”

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

In her book, Grace for the Good Girl , Emily P. Freeman charts her early years growing up in the church believing in grace but living according to the rules of perfection. One thing that would, a...

Merciful God, in baptism you promise forgiveness and new life, making us part of the body of Christ. We confess that we remain preoccupied with ourselves, separated from one another. We cling to destr...

The late comedian Sam Levenson enjoyed sharing funny anecdotes about his childhood, especially his early school days. One of his favorite stories was about his first day of school, when his overly pro...

..the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between the past, present, and future ultimately meaningless: to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that s...

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experienc...