Your Past Doesn’t Have to Dictate Your Potential

Your past does not have to define your potential or your future. Whatever your story, good or bad, divine or dysfunctional, you are no exception. Age, gender, race, background, family history, bad breaks, and bad choices, along with any and all dividing lines in humanity, don’t have to create any limits when we follow in our Father’s footsteps.

When I was a child, my father left my loving mother, who was paralyzed due to sclerosis, and took me with him. He married a woman who confined me and my younger sister to our bedrooms with little food or water. Then my father left again, but this time, he abandoned me too.

If you met me when I was young, you wouldn’t have thought I’d have much potential. Just applying my childhood story to simple statistics would tell the tale that I was headed for trouble. As a young man, did I have the opportunity to repeat the sins of my father? Absolutely. Once again, statistics would skew toward me doing just that. But God had his hand on my life. He gave me my own free will and my own choice not to repeat my father’s life but to repent and turn those tragedies around to create the opposite outcome.

When I met Christ at almost thirty years old, I realized the life that God had designed for me all along, no matter my circumstances growing up. His redemption changed everything and offered me a clean slate driven by his potential, no longer my own as a victim of my upbringing.

Today, while Jessica and I don’t claim to have a perfect marriage, we do have a strong marriage. And we are committed parents to our two boys. Just because those things happened to me as a child did not mean my future was, or is, doomed to repeat the past.

My life makes no sense, but it was never in my hands or my parents’, always in my Father’s hands. The world screams loudly that our past determines our future. But God whispers to us that our past does not dictate our potential. Jesus died for all—regardless of our past—so that we can experience new life.

God, thank you for the new life you give me. Please show me how to break free from my past and embrace the potential you have for me.