"Junk" Filled Journals

The covers of the notebooks were varied, all obviously for a little girl, with pinks and purples…stripes and checks…hearts and butterflies…Bible verses and quotes. One even had a tiny little lock on it to protect the writer from intruders into her private thoughts. The journals held secrets, deep dark secrets of years gone by and thoughts locked away in a mind and body that had not been protected.

The words written on the pages had been torn from the covers and burned in a grill on a hot summer day;  the skeletons that were left served only as reminders of what once was.

Although the covers remained, the pages were gone, turned to ashes. The fire curled the edges of the pages first consuming the words written there, eventually turning the paper to a fine gray powder that would dissolve on your fingertips. The fire obliterated the diaries that had been so meticulously used to record the pain and hurt from years gone by, but fire doesn’t just destroy. It can also be used for healing, light, purification and even new life.

When a forest fire consumes a wooded area, it seems at first to have ruined everything, but after a period, from the ashes and rubble left behind new life springs forth from the ground and soon the new saplings are growing and producing beauty. That’s what God promises—to turn ashes into a crown of beauty.

That was the goal when the "junk" filled pages were put to the flame. The old life of my friend was demolished, but not without a purpose—to bring about a transformed new healthy life filled with purity and light. When clinging to the past it’s hard to move into the future, so the ashes were thrown into the rushing water; water that would carry the remains across the country to the ocean where no one would ever be able to read them again.

It’s hard to let go of the past, but if you don’t it continues to control, haunt and disturb you from the inside.

Maybe your past is not written in journals, but is there something that needs to be cast away forever? If so, why don’t you begin disposing of it today? It might not be easy, but it can release you, relieve you and restore you to the person God created you to be.  

Philippians 3:13-14 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. 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.

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