Going Forward, Not Looking Back…I made a huge step in the last 24 hours…I switched from Microsoft Outlook to Gmail! To some of you this may not seem like a big deal, but to a 58 year old male that has been using Outlook since Al Gore invented the internet, it was a HUGE deal. Yes, I meant to scream the word huge…some of the blogging lingo that I am learning as well. The migration from Outlook to Gmail took roughly 8 hours. Why, you say? Because I am a “pack rat”. You see, I save everything…even emails. After all, you never know when you might need to refer to the old stuff. I had emails arranged in my nice neat Outlook folder system dating back to 2001, when I first started at the church. After all, I could not delete emails just in case someone had a question on the 2001 church budget!! So, after 8 hours… the migration was complete…14,280 emails were migrated into Gmail. Hooray, man was I happy…now all I had to do was go through and “clean things” up a bit.

Well, last night, after suffering through most of game 1 of the World series (yes, I am a Yankees fan)…I deleted about 600 emails, one by one. Then I decided that this was crazy! I was saving stuff hat I would never ever use again. The migration included my contacts and and my calendar…which are really important to me…more so than the old emails. So, I did the only logical thing that any normal 58 year old man in my situation would do…I deleted all of the remaining migration files. Yes, I wiped the slate clean. I am starting over. I realized that the baggage of my past was holding me back from moving forward! So, now I am looking forward. I have made myself a resolution to keep my inbox clean, not save old emails and use the archive system provided in Gmail. I am not looking back. I am going forward.

A great spiritual application…how many times in our lives do we dwell in the past? We beat ourselves up by drudging up our past behavior. God is not interested in the past. If we have accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Saviour, He has forgiven us of our sins. He is more interested what we will do from this day forward. If you haven’t accepted Christ as your personal Saviour, now is the time. God knows that we are sinners and cannot live without sin…that is why He sent His Son to die for us.  He wants us to repent and turn away from sin, not dwell on it. Although, we must understand that there are consequences of our past sin. We cannot escape those. He wants us to move forward through His leadership…that requires the surrender of our past and the surrender of our present lives to Him. Join me…wipe the slate clean and move forward.