Let The Past Be!

Yaay, it’s our last post of the year!!!

2020 has indeed been a different year. We bless God for life and every blessing we received in the year. With a pandemic which caused disruptions in different sectors, loss of lives, properties, jobs and efforts, the year did not go as planned for a lot of people.

However, a brave woman would say “turn your wounds into wisdom”. Words mean more when they truly reflect our stories. Tomorrow changes us beyond our past so thoroughly that we always do not look like what we have been through. This has been the story of most people who let go of their past, tenacious people who let the past be, to focus on a greater light.

Oprah Winfrey is one of these people who taught us through her life to “turn your wounds into wisdom”. We admire her state today, but most of us would not want to share in her childhood story, or even wish the same for our little ones.

Oprah was born into a very poor family. She suffered the trauma of living in a divorced home and sometimes cared for by people who were not her biological parents. This exposed her to being raped, for years, by a family member sent to nurse her. Without proper care and guidance, she reverted to sex, drugs, and alcohol. Before age fourteen, she was discovered pregnant and eventually lost her baby through premature delivery.

Joyce Meyer’s story is also similar to that of Oprah’s. Joyce suffered sexual, verbal, and emotional violation by her father, who should have protected her, until she turned age eighteen.

If Oprah did not let go, she would not be living a celebrated life today. She would not have been a renowned media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. She would not have been one of Africa’s richest woman today if she held on to her past. Joyce would not have been a charismatic Christian author and speaker today, whose works have changed millions of lives today and have given hope to so many young women.

I remember one of her works “Reduce Me to Love” that completely transformed the life of a Nigerian Naval officer who only felt bitterness and anger towards women based on the abuse he experienced when he was a child. If Joyce, did not let go, she would not have any business discussing or documenting articles of love, and that Naval officer would have inflicted more pain to the world.

Struggles are always experienced when we want to change. Letting go of our pasts comes with its unique struggles. Our eyes tear up when we did not ask it to. Our hearts suddenly become bitter when our minds race back. Trusting again becomes even harder. Even in the atmosphere of joy and celebration, we easily snap away from that excited mood and cling to the sorrows of our past, especially when events bring up that memory. This struggle comes to us differently, but to lean on them, to meditate on them, to let them steal the joy of the moment or morrow is to hurt ourselves even more and keep us from truly serving the world. Our pasts, especially the ugly ones, should remain as past.

These pasts may not have been our initial bargain, but they help us tell better stories; they help us see the weakness of the world; they gift us a rare experience that makes us quintessential solution providers to our world. When we consistently use it up to impact the world positively, a day for us may come where the world will be ready to hear our story and millions will be liberated through it, just as it happened for Oprah and Joyce.

Proverbs 24:16a puts it well “For a just man falls seven times and rises again...”. The failure is the person who decided to stay down. That is surely not you. So get up, dust your butt, pick your rod, and walk. The world awaits you!!!

We wish you a blissful and fulfilling 2021

Love always 💜