Making peace with our past is essential to our spiritual health.  On our journey through life we accumulate a lot of emotional baggage.  The past tends to leave us with an assortment of mistakes, mistreatments, and missed opportunities.  The accumulation of guilt, resentment, and fear can become a burden too heavy to carry at times.  We come from imperfect backgrounds which have contributed to our own personal perplexities.  Most of us have a lot to live up to and a lot to live down.  Whatever our past has been we have to adjust to its realities.  We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend it never existed.  Our past is just as real as the present.  Our inner child of the past is still with us.  Yesterday's ledger affects today's balance sheet.  We cannot fully escape where we have been, what we have done, and who has shared a part of our pilgrimage.  Our past is like a boomerang.  We cannot completely throw it away.  It keeps coming back to influence our daily decisions and to affect our peace of mind.

In making peace with our past, honesty is our greatest ally.  The ability to look back with integrity has many healthy implications.  Because memory can play tricks on us, we can read more into a past occurrence than the truth can support.  Memory can exaggerate or minimize, whichever serves us best at the moment.  As best we can, we need to let the past be the past and treat it with truth and grace.  The pain of looking back occurs when there is an unwillingness to forgive and forget.  In making peace with the past, not only do we forgive others but we forgive ourselves as well.  We learn to let bygones be bygones as we move redemptively through the present into the future.

Whenever we make peace with our past, it will be a spiritual experience.  Faith is a prerequisite, repentance is a necessity, and grace makes it happen.  The truth of the matter is that in Christ we can experience peace about our past.  Dysfunctional relationships can be healed in the light of His forgiving love.  Mistreatment, rejection and lifelong anxieties can be resolved when we are serious about making peace with our past.  Perhaps Paul said it best when he wrote, "But one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Having such peace is indeed a work of grace.