Leaving Your Baggage in the Past

[Forum Administrator]

6 Steps to Leaving Your Baggage in the Past
From the book "God Will Make a Way" by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend

So how does God make a way for us to leave behind our old baggage from the past? Here are six steps you can ask God to help you take.

1. Agree that you have a problem from the past, and confess it. No issue can be overcome until we admit that it exists and no feeling - whether anger, or passion, or "numb" - exists for no reason.

When Karen called into our radio program about her lack of desire for sex with her husband, she didn't see any connection between the current problem and the sexual abuse she had experienced earlier in her life. Until she could acknowledge that the significant and damaging events in her past had a major effect on her now, she could not work through them. And as long as she could not work through those experiences, they continued to be present, not past.

God's word for "agree" is the word that is translated "confess." To confess something means that we agree that it is true. When it comes to baggage that is bothering us, we must recognize that things have gone wrong - either to us or by us - and agree with God, or "confess," that they happened and affected us deeply.

2. Get healing and express grief. The next step is to receive the care and healing we need to deal with whatever has happened to wound us. If your heart has been broken, then you have to allow others to give you God's care and love to help mend that broken heart. Also, our past losses and hurts can be healed as we allow ourselves to attach to them the sadness that's warranted. Simply put, we need to grieve. Ecclesiastes 7:3 says, Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart.

3. Receive forgiveness. Many times the pain that we drag into new situations is the pain of failure from the past. If you are feeling guilty or ashamed of things that you have done, you cannot tackle life with gusto. Leaving our baggage behind means that we have to know we are totally accepted, forgiven, and loved. That kind of forgiveness and love is the kind of love that God has for all of us. All we have to do is ask for it and receive it.

4. Forgive others. Resentment and lack of forgiveness tie us to the offenses that initially caused those feelings. To the degree we have not forgiven, everyone who has ever hurt us still hurts us every day. God has provided a way for us to be free of past debts that are owed - the same way that he takes care of our debts: forgiveness. When we forgive others, we are free.

To forgive does not mean that we deny that someone has hurt us. Not does it mean that we have to necessarily trust them again or allow them into our heart again. That depends on whether they've seen the error of their ways and repented. But forgiveness is not about the future and whether we are going to open up and be vulnerable again. It's about letting go of what has already happened. It's about acknowledging both the things that were done to harm us and the debt that we are owed.

5. Examine your ways. A significant part of the baggage of the past has to do with patterns of behavior that we learned from hurtful situations. And the list of self-defeating patterns we can develop is almost endless. The principle for all of them is the same: Patterns we have learned in the past can be baggage ruining our present.

6. See the new you through new eyes. Another kind of baggage we carry around is the view of ourselves that we learned in past relationships or situation. We find out who we are through the people who love us or, sometimes, through the ones who don't.