The future often requires us to stop defending our past

​One of the most familiar sentiments in my life is this feeling, a constant internal nagging, a desperate plea of sorts to myself:

You have got to change!

For the better part of the last forty years I have walked around feeling an internal threat.

Change or else.

And over that period I have changed a lot. An awful lot. Yet, I have also continued to experience my fair share of the or else.

Late last year, through a series of events, I realized that I'd spent an awful lot of that trying to change period clinging to things I'd come to believe I'd never be able to change. My ugly past had made these things such a big part of who I'd become, that my future was just going to have to accept these parts of me are coming along for the ride.

Until I had this come to Jesus moment. It was a dream or a vision of sorts. Jesus was standing at the TSA checkpoint. He looked me square in the eyes and said, you can go anywhere you want, but not if you're bringing that stuff along.

He stood their pointing at three bags in my hands.

For much of my life I have been changing while living a life that felt like there was no change at all. In that TSA moment, Jesus showed up to point at the reasons why.

On January 1, I committed to board the plane to my future and leave the things behind that TSA agent said weren't permitted beyond the checkpoint. The things he said had been standing between me and my future all along.

It was the Agent's way of saying, you can change all you want, but until you're truly done defending your past, there is no such thing as a future.

It's been 55 days since I boarded that plane. Fifty five days since I left three bags at that checkpoint. Fifty five days since I've picked up any of those bags in an attempt to sneak them aboard the flight.

To my recollection, a recollection I'm fairly confident in, I haven't gone 55 days without any one of those three things the last 40 years, let alone all of them at once.

What's in those bags is a story for another day, I promise.

But the story for this day is this:

As clearly as I have ever seen it, I see a future. As sure as I've ever felt it, I am no longer daily fighting to change my life, I am daily taking the next step into the life I have always been created to live.

I am more sure than ever that the future is certainly built on the things from our yesterday that we take along with us. So much of where we've been and what we've experienced has a place in our tomorrow.

But maybe the most hopeful future comes when we give up defending the things from our yesterday that have every intention of destroying tomorrow as effectively as they damaged yesterday. Things we've come to defend as part of us that our future refuses to have any part of at all.

If you feel like you're fighting to change, and maybe even that you are changing, yet life isn't moving into the future you'd hoped would follow that change, maybe examine what you're still holding onto.

Maybe examine the things from your past you're still defending in hopes that they may play some supporting role in the story of your future.

I panicked when Jesus told me there is no flight available to accommodate those bags.

And I won't lie. Some days have been hell without those bags; I'd carried them for nearly 15,000 days of my life.

I'm pretty sure I don't have 15,000 days left in my life, and that's fine. What isn't fine, however, is living whatever numbered days I have left fighting to change instead of embracing my future.

What are you trying to take into your future that has no place there?

It's worth examining.

The answer may be standing between you and the future you've come to believe gave up on you. Well it didn't give up on you. It's just been waiting on you to give up.

Give up defending your past.