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In the book Beloved, the main character, Sethe, wrestles with how she can prevail over the trauma of slavery while the memories are still alive and well. Many of us have this struggle. How do we overcome the past, when it still holds influence over us?

I’ve talked before about what many wise men and women have said and written…you don’t need to erase the past or block it out, or forget it. You need to embrace it, use it, and let it appropriately inform your future. Who we are is a direct result of where we’ve been and what we’ve experienced. Good. Bad. Ugly. Every mistake, every poor choice, every act of abuse or betrayal or trespass, it’s all been used to design you and equip you for your God-given purpose.

This means many of us need to closely examine how we treat the past, because we’ve likely made the mistake of letting memories (particularly bad ones) continue to derail us in our daily lives. To hold us down and oppress us. To define us. To strip hope, peace and joy from us. To poison our thoughts. To haunt our dreams.

We have to stop using our memory as a torture device, or a shaming technique, as evidence to substantiate the lies we tell ourselves, as an escape from reality, as an excuse for a pity party, as a cage that renders us helpless and depressed, as a way to keep score and justify our victim hood, or as a glass ceiling that limits our future potential.

Instead, we should leverage our memory positively to retain and recall the lessons we’ve learned, to keep us humble before God, to keep us filled with gratitude, as a means of instruction for others and ourselves, as a counter balance to irrational present thoughts or future tripping, as a detailed ledger of our strengths and our weaknesses, as a way to measure how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go.

Memories can be an extraordinarily powerful tool for our healing and our health. They can also be a cancer that gnaws at us from the inside and blinds us from all that is beautiful about ourselves, our lives and the world around us. Some things just go. They don’t hang around in our memory. Some things do. I strongly believe any memories that are strong enough to stay with us (good or bad or ugly) are to be used for a greater purpose. They have magical powers waiting to be harnessed. But like any superhero, we have to use that power for good and not in destructive ways.

Just a quick word of encouragement…regardless of how much trauma lives on in your memory…today you are blessed beyond measure. Air filling your lungs. Beauty filling your eyes. Music filling your ears. You can choose joy. You can leave the pain behind while you carry its scars. You can actually use the past to create more of the joy you seek now. It’s all about perspective. Trust me, it’s not easy. It’s a daily discipline. I’m not fully executing on it at the moment, which is why I needed to get it down in a blog post and place it in front of me. I needed a reminder today. Maybe you did too?