Journey of a Thousand Miles

Stop being ashamed of your past. We are more than the mistakes that we make. The cross was enough. If you refuse to accept God's forgiveness, then you are saying that the cross was not enough. Use your past to help someone else, but don't beat yourself up about it. Only use it for God's glory. Embrace what you learned from your mistakes and move on. Guard your heart and mind from Satan's lies regarding your past sin. Don't waste Jesus' death by not letting go of past guilt and shame. "It is finished." God is ready to celebrate your return. He is not holding anything over your head.

Life and I are starting to become great friends. Through my process of recovery, I have been spending some time in the Word and reading about suffering. In the past, I have had a bad relationship with suffering. Actually, I take that back. After alot of bad things happened to me, I started to believe that God was punishing me, that I had done something wrong to deserve the bad things that happened to me. I grew a huge guilt complex that carried me through college and then into the real world and the more bad things that happened to me, the more I believed I deserved it and started to expect bad things to happen to me. Needless to say, suffering grew a bad name with me. So I started to read about suffering in the Bible and realized that Jesus did alot of suffering too. Alot of godly people in the Bible did alot of suffering, and that’s when I realized... suffering happens to good people too, it’s part of living in a fallen world, and none of these people were being punished by God....