Snapping the Ties that Bind

It’s a helpless feeling to suffer negative emotions caused by a troubling past. The question is this: Is it possible to break free from bonds that hold us down? I say yes, if we rely on God’s grace and deal with our past one step at a time.

If your past negatively impacts your life today, you may feel like the main character in the tale, Gulliver’s Travels. After a storm at sea, Gulliver swam to shore and fell asleep on the beach. When he awoke, he was in Lilliput, a land of tiny people six inches tall. A crowd of them had tied him down with rope no thicker than thread in relation to the giant-sized Gulliver. Any one of the tiny ropes could have been easily snapped. Yet, in such great numbers, he was bound so securely he couldn’t move.

Taken together, the wounds from your past can tie you down in a similar way. Although you can’t change the past, you can change how your past affects you in the present. To do that, snap your emotional ropes one by one instead of trying to break from everything all at once. With God’s grace, you’ll soon get a finger loose, then a hand, then an arm. And, eventually, you’ll be free from the negative emotions that keep you down.