Admit Your Mistakes and Move On

We are learning how to be more courageous through my series, Confident in God's Hands. Today, I would like to consider how we get mired down by our past. As survivors, many of us get stuck there, because we believe that we can't shake off the mistakes we've made.

Even successful people make mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes, but truly successful people don't give up. Consider some famous people who overcame their past mistakes to achieve incredible success.

In his early years, teachers told Thomas Edison that he was "too stupid to learn anything." He didn't fare much better in his career, either. He was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive enough. Even as an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. Of course, all those unsuccessful attempts finally resulted in the design that worked.

Most people know Oprah as one of the most iconic faces on TV. However, she was fired from her job as a television reporter, because she was told that she was "unfit for tv." But she didn't let her past mistakes dictate who she would become, and today she is one of the richest and most successful women in the world.

Back in 1954, Elvis Presley was a nobody, and Jimmy Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis after just one performance. He told him, "You ain't goin' nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck." Elvis didn't let his mistakes stop him, and he went on to become one of the most memorable musicians of the twentieth century.

God loved us first.
The Bible tells us, My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can't know him if you don't love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they've done to our relationship with God.
(1 John 4:8 MSG)

We can see from this passage that God loved us first, and then he sent Jesus to die for our sins. It doesn't say that he waited for us to be perfect, and then he sent Jesus to take us to heaven. So if we're bypassing opportunities because we feel that we don't measure up in God's sight, it's time to rethink how we're operating. With God on our side, we can admit our mistakes and get on with our lives.

Move on.
If we're holding ourselves back because of mistakes we've made in the past, we must admit where we've gone wrong, learn from our errors, and move on. By constantly self-checking and improving our outcomes, we can succeed.

If other people are telling us that we're making mistakes, we must consider whether or not there is any truth in what they're saying. If there is, we will have to work at changing. If they're simply the type of people who constantly drag us down with criticism, we must ignore them or leave them behind.

God knows where we are going in this life and in the next. We can't let our mistakes of the past or other people's opinions of us hold us back. With a little faith in ourselves and belief in God's love for us, we can accomplish just about anything.

Today's Challenge
Decide today to take a chance on something you've always wanted to do, even if you have always believed that your past failures will hold you back. Admit your mistakes, learn from them, and move on!