Getting Past Your Past

The forty-something year old man sits at his desk. He stares at the spreadsheet on his computer. The numbers he is crunching don’t look much different than they looked yesterday. He and his wife get along. Some of the passion from early in the relationship seems to be missing, but it could be worse. The kids are great, but they are growing up so fast. Life is usually busy, sometimes stressful, and passes by like an hourglass stuck to a table. Meanwhile, he is staring at a spreadsheet on his computer.

The woman in her mid twenties is walking around the lake. Her iPod blasts country music. She politely smiles at the people riding their bikes, pushing their jogging strollers, and walking their dogs. Her smile is more a surface smile. Inside she isn’t all that happy. She works in marketing and loves her job. She enjoys hanging out with her friends. Those things aren’t the problem. She walks faster, turns the music up louder, and keeps cranking out those smiles. 

As the man stares at his computer, he goes back a decade or so to a time in his life when he was addicted to alcohol. With deep regret he remembers the days and nights he wasn’t home with his wife and kids. Even if he was home, he still has a lot to regret. He beats himself up over the night he was arrested for driving with too much liquor in his system. He wishes he could have found a more constructive way to deal with stress than a short-term reprieve of a few shots of whiskey and lots of beer. He is clean now and has been for some time, but the past has a tight stranglehold on him and the opponent’s grip is not getting any looser. He keeps staring at that spreadsheet. 

As the woman continues around the lake she looks at her index finger on her left hand. It is empty. A ring was on the finger for ten months—about five years ago. It was shiny and beautiful. It represented faith, hope, and love. She was engaged. Life was perfect. The wedding date was set. Then one day, he told her they needed to postpone the wedding. He had some excuse about this being a really busy year with his job. She believed him and supported him. A few months later he broke it off and broke her heart. To make things worse, a year later he married another woman. They say time heals all wounds. It’s been five years and she ain’t there yet. 

The man’s office and the woman’s lake are less than a mile apart. He is 45 and she is 25. Their lives are much different, but the issue they need to deal with is the same: getting past their past. They, and pretty much everybody else they know, need to heal from pain inflicted by others and by self. Things like forgiveness, getting over our failures, and not letting others define us are the first and most important steps to contentment, fulfillment, satisfaction and joy.

The past: we can’t change a darn thing about it. We can learn from it: the good, the bad, and ugly. And, somehow, we have to put it behind us. Doing things such as this sure beats the alternative. 

I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead. –Philippians 3:13 

The best is yet to come… 

Craig

Letter to Graduates

Dear Graduate,

You will get a lot of these notes over the next few weeks: 

Make the world a better place. 

Live life with no regrets.

Chase your dreams. 

Laugh often. 

Work hard.

Love all.

It seems like yesterday to your parents when they dropped you off at Kindergarten for the first time. They wiped the tears from their eyes as this little person walked into this big door. Since that day you have attended school about 2,340 times. You have learned. You have made friends. You have been hurt. You have been mentored. Some days it was lots of fun. Some days it wasn’t much fun at all. Your parents are going to watch you graduate soon. The same teary eyes that dropped you off at Kindergarten thirteen years ago will surely well-up as you walk across the stage.

I want to tell you some things I wish somebody would have told me twenty-three years ago when I graduated from high school. Things I have learned the hard way.

Fail often and fail well. Failure is a necessary step to success and significance. Failure teaches courage, wisdom, humility, and perseverance like only failure can. I don’t want you to get to the end of your days wondering what might have been if you had only taken a risk, but didn’t, because of the fear of failure. Tomorrow’s dreams are made possible by today’s failures.

Don’t forget to play. People will tell you to study hard when you go to college and work hard when you get a job. I agree with those people. I’ve studied hard and worked hard all my adult life. But I want you to hear this: Don’t forget to play. My best memories in life are not sitting in front of my computer writing my dissertation or standing in front of people preaching the Gospel. I enjoyed those times, but my best memories are swimming in a lake with my boys and exploring the country with my wife. 

Love people and not possessions. Stuff can give you happiness for a while. People will give you joy and contentment for a lifetime. Spend much of your time, energy, and resources investing in people rather than acquiring things. Jesus pretty much says the same thing when he asks: “What good is it to gain the world and forfeit your soul?” The soul designed to live in community with others and with God.

Have faith. Some things in life can be proven. Sound travels faster than light. The moon doesn’t shine its own light. But the most important things in life can’t be proven. We can’t prove a friend is a friend or that forgiveness is better than revenge or that love is better than hate or that God is holy. That is where faith comes in. Have faith in self, others, and God. You’ll need it because the most important things can’t be proven.

The best is yet to come…

Craig

Failing Well

The crinkled up, five-page paper had a big red “F” on the front of it. The best I could tell, the words the professor wrote across the front page were: Complete waste of time!

So it wasn’t my best work. My wife just had surgery on her knee. I led a ski trip with over one-hundred high school students and a dozen or so brave adults from Atlanta, Georgia to Sugar Mountain, North Carolina the weekend before the Monday the paper was due. Not to mention the Greek test I had to study for. It’s not like I had a lot of time or energy to write a profound discourse on Paul’s Second Missionary Journey and Its Implications for the Twenty-First Century Church.

I was defined by that “F” word again: Failure. It can shatter self-confidence. It can harden a heart. It can destroy dreams. It can lessen life.

It wasn’t the first time I failed. In high school I lost more wrestling matches than I won. I had seven girlfriends before I got married. I don’t know if all seven included me as their boyfriend, but it’s all good. I even managed to lose a couple thousand dollars on a fundraiser for the student ministry I once led.

And thankfully it wasn’t the last time I failed. I ended up in the hospital during the 2007 Boston Marathon. At my church in Dallas, I led a team who started a Friday night worship service for men and women in recovery. After six unsuccessful weeks, hundreds of hours of labor, and thousands of dollars of resources—we turned off our projectors and closed our doors for the last time.

And thankfully it wasn’t the last time I failed.

J.K. Rowling’s marriage ended in divorce, her parents wouldn’t claim her, and she lost all of her money. At the commencement address at Harvard University in 2008 she said: 

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free. I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so failure became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. 

Those little Harry Potter books she wrote were possible because of her failures.

Learning to fail well is an essential part of life. Failure is a necessary step to success and significance. Failure teaches courage, wisdom, humility, and perseverance like only failure can. God transforms our failures into things beautiful, profitable, and blessed. Failure should not be looked down on in life because sometimes it’s failure that makes a life. Tomorrow’s dreams are made possible by today’s failures.

The best is yet to come…

Craig