the past

Swept Away by Grace: Releasing Failures with the Holy Ghost

Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

Our church opens our doors for two hours every Saturday in January so we can gather to pray. I just returned from tonight’s session, and I returned with a word from Him to me – and you.

“Let the wind of the Holy Ghost sweep away your attachment to your failures.”

For years, I battled a tendency to not let go of my failures, to keep beating myself up for them even after I’d repented and received God’s forgiveness. I broke the worst of that tendency a few years back when God rebuked me. As He reminded me, if I were to criticize and berate one of His kids the way I was attacking myself He’d call me out for sin. And, obviously, He then reminded me that I am one of His kids too – and it was still sin.

What He said tonight hit me in a fresh way. God specializes in that, you know. If you don’t fully understand the first time, He’ll say it differently. In this one sentence He said so much!

  • The Holy Ghost has the power to sweep away those attachments if we let Him.
  • They are our attachments. Those failures aren’t attached to us; we’re attached to them. They’re nothing but memories and have no power on their own. The devil can toss them up in our faces, but as long as we’re not attached to them, they’ll slide right off and hit the floor, powerless.
  • We must choose to let the Holy Ghost remove them. Then we must decide, every minute of every day, if necessary, to refuse to pick those threads up again. We can: We can either pick them back up and get attached (and attacked) all over again, or we can refuse to ever touch them again. It’s not easy, but it is doable.

God says so! Here’s some proof.

No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.
Philippians 3:13-14 NLT (emphasis mine)

Paul, of all people, had things he could have refused to forgive himself for, mistakes from his past that he might have permitted to drag him down. He chose to forget the past and only look forward.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.
Hebrews 12:1 NLT (emphasis mine)

“Let us strip off every weight that slows us down,” the teacher says. Yes, that definitely includes those past mistakes, even the huge ones. If they (or anything else) slow us down in our pursuit of God, they’ve got to go!

And…

He has removed our sins as far from us
as the east is from the west.
Psalm 103:12 NLT

If He’s removed the sins, they’re gone. Only the memories of those sins remain, and we have no business digging them up or entertaining them if the devil tries to do the digging. If God removes our sins so completely, it stands to reason that He removes our mistakes, big ones and small ones, as well.

Be at peace. Let the Holy Spirit rid you of those attachments forever.

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

That Door is Closed

Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

It’s strange, the things that can kick you in the gut.

In my homeschooling years, and beyond, I was very active in the homeschool community. I wrote articles. I spoke at conferences. I sold my books and my publisher’s books at conferences. I was one of the editors of a small, printed, homeschool magazine that eventually became a very large, internet magazine.

Yeah, that last is where the kick comes from. EHO, The Eclectic Homeschool Online, was a massive internet magazine. It was massive in both content and readership. Everything we ever published stayed published, and I know I remember us having 40,000 readers a month at one point – most print magazines didn’t have readerships that large. I loved EHO, loved the ministry, loved my writers, loved our readers… Leaving was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.

So today I was thinking about it and went to check it out. It’s been a static site for a while, but still… And it wasn’t there. I got the “Safari Can’t Find Server” screen. That black screen is a reminder that, as much as you appreciate your past, you really can’t return to it. And you know what? It hurts…

Oh, I’ll get over it. It’s just that there was something reassuring, on those days when I felt “less than,” about being able to go back and look at what I’d helped accomplish and think about all the homeschoolers whose hands we’d held along the way. I think about them now and hope that many of their kids are homeschooling today. Yes, it’s been that long.

That door is closed. It has been, really; Safari is just reminding me that looking back only serves so many purposes. The point is to walk through the next open door.

Celebrating Jesus!
Tammy C

The Past Comes Back

Tammy M CardwellLeave a comment

Several years ago, I was on a road trip and a comment was made about the leaves changing colors. I’d recently learned the science behind it and offered the information that the colors are there all the time; they’re just covered up by the green of the chlorophyll. Instantly, one of my companions said, “There she goes…correcting us again.”

I was stunned, and I was hurt. I explained that no, I just found the information fascinating and had thought they would too. She understood and apologized, and we were good, but the incident stands in my memory as a reminder that, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, your past will sometimes come back to haunt you.

You see, I used to be really bad about correcting people. I assumed everyone was like me, wanting to know how to use good grammar, properly pronounce words, use expressions correctly, etc. When this event occurred, however, I had been actively not correcting people for a long time.

It came about as a result of correcting a friend (with pure motives, I assure you) and offending her. On that day I decided that I would never again correct her in any way unless she asked for it. It didn’t take long for me to realize this was the best policy to use with everyone. I do still occasionally correct people, but when I do it’s a slip up and I try to apologize. I can’t stop the edits that go on in my brain, but I can keep them from passing my lips.

So by the time the “always correcting” comment was made it didn’t apply anymore, but she was so locked into the way I used to be that she didn’t even realize it.

I’m glad I remembered this incident today. It’s a good reminder, to me, to not judge people by what they used to be, to not be the one who brings their past back to haunt them, but rather to accept them as who they are today. Sometimes that may mean I have to really look at them, taking a fresh look and even getting to know them all over again in a sense.

It’s worth the effort. Friendship is that important.
Celebrating Jesus!

Tammy C