Re-frame The Past

This blog is a personal example of finding freedom from fear.

Some years ago, I went through a significant time of persistent hurt. Praise God, the situation changed, and I’ve healed greatly from it. However, even years on, I have carried fear of it happening again.

Perhaps past hurts have left you with fear too?

I didn’t want this fear to be part of my life going forward, and so I decided to bring the issue to a Celebrate Recovery ‘Step Study’. The time spent in my Step Study group working through the Celebrate Recovery Participant’s Guides helped me see specifically what my fears were – fear of being misrepresented, fear of being wrongly blamed, and more. 

However, by the time we reached Principle 5 where we are encouraged to ask God to remove our character defects, I was still unsure what my character defects were! Surely, I’d done nothing wrong; it was the bullies that caused this, not me! Yes, I wasn’t to blame for the hurt done and I couldn’t change the past, but I could do something about the leftover fear. 

Though my hurts differ from Lysa TerKeurst’s hurts, these words from her book, “Forgiving What You Can’t Forget”, resonated with me: “….are you angry that you haven’t seen God defend you?” 

By seeing in print the words “you haven’t seen God defend you”, I was forced to recognise that I had felt abandoned and unprotected by God. Yet, the Bible tells us that God is with us and that He protects us. This mismatch between God’s truth and how I had seen the hurtful situation, nudged me into recognising that doubting God’s presence and protection of me was keeping my fears in place. My character defects were about doubting God’s goodness.

I talked this through with my accountability partners and they helped me remember how God had pre-warned me of the coming hurt in a dream before it happened, and how people who knew nothing of my situation had shared incredibly relevant Bible verses with me during the hurtful period. 

I’m now in the process of re-framing how I see the past – shifting my focus from how people hurt me to what God was and is doing through that situation. I’ve written a prayer I pray daily which contains the biblical truths I need to hold onto in order to frame that period of life in a way that feeds faith not fear. I now believe, “…the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength” 2 Timothy 4:17a. He was with me and is with me. He was protecting me and continues to protect me. 

P.S. Look closely at the frames in the picture to see how we could re-frame the past to focus on what God did and not on what people did.