Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

James‬ ‭5‬:‭16

Having explored the deficits of our lives, the minefield of past grievances and the plague of selfishness that has permeated our relationships, let’s do something about it.

My first instinct is to ignore it. To bottle it up and catalogue it as the past. To move forward. To not look back.

And you know, there’s some goodness in those instincts. But they don’t go far enough.

If I’m going to move forward, I’ve got to dive in deeply first. I’ve got to sift through the detritus and look for the beating heart of the monster I had become. Because bottling it up won’t kill it. And we ought to be out for blood.

Here too, our instincts are good, but completely useless by themselves. It’s not enough to dig up the past and examine it. We need to share it with an impartial mentor.

We don’t want to bring someone into the wreckage to get hurt. But we need a third-party to audit things for us.

This practice of confession is crucial to killing the habits of the past. In sharing with a trusted ally, we bond together against the past and are equipped to strangle its hold on our future.

God, I need to be free of my past. Help me expose its vampiric embrace to the light.