Turn the Page: When Yesterday Tries to Write Today

You can’t start the next chapter of your life while you’re still rereading the last one.

That sounds simple, almost cliché. But for many of us, it’s the very reason we feel spiritually stuck. We ask God to move us forward, while our hearts are still anchored to what hurt us. We long for something new, but we’re still living inside something old.

I once read a quote that hit me harder than most sermons I’ve heard:

“To heal a wound, you have to stop touching it.”

That’s where we get caught.
Not in what happened, but in how we keep holding it.

We replay it in our minds.
We rehash it in conversations.
We re-engage people and patterns that keep us bound.
We resist boundaries because deep down, we hope maybe this time it’ll be different.

But pain doesn’t heal in confusion. It heals in clarity.

And the longer we circle the same emotional terrain, the more we begin to believe that this is all life will ever be. We turn our wounds into narratives. We turn our setbacks into stopping points. We pitch tents in valleys God never intended us to live in.

Let’s be honest:

• We’ve made pain a place.
• We’ve made regret a rhythm.
• We’ve made survival a spiritual identity.

And it’s wearing us down.

I see this all the time in leadership. Pastors stuck in shame loops. Parents reliving what they should’ve done differently. Leaders frozen in indecision because they’re still carrying the trauma of rejection or failure from a decade ago.

We want healing, but we won’t stop rehearsing the pain.

We rehash it.
We relive it.
We reopen it.
But we never release it.

That’s why some wounds never close.
They’ve been touched too often to form a scar.

The Bible Says It Better

Scripture doesn’t give us permission to live in cycles. It calls us to move.

One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead…
- Philippians 3:13 ESV

Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old…
- Isaiah 43:18 ESV

No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.
- Luke 9:62 ESV

There’s a reason Jesus emphasized forward motion. It’s not about denying the past, it’s about not living there anymore.

In 1 Kings 18, the prophet Elijah confronts a people caught in between. Their loyalty was divided. Their hearts torn. And Elijah asks a piercing question:

How long will you halt between two opinions? (v. 21)

The Hebrew word for halt means to limp, to waver, to be unsteady on your feet.

It’s the picture of someone trying to walk forward while still leaning backward.
It’s what we look like when we’re not sure if we’re allowed to move on.

But You Are

You are not defined by your trauma.
You are not defined by who hurt you.
You are not defined by the silence of unanswered prayers or the scars you carry in secret.

You are defined by a God who restores what people broke.

You are defined by a Savior who rewrites stories, not just improves them.

And maybe this is the only thing you need to hear today:

It’s time to turn the page.

You don’t have to know what the next chapter holds.
You just have to trust that God does.

You’re not walking away from your story, you’re just letting God write again.